Cultish: Ellen G. White & The Millerites
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In the 1st part of this long-awaited series, we look into the historical origins of Ellen G White & the underlying worldview that formulated the 7th Day-Adventist church.
Whether you are a former or active Seventh-day Adventist, or just generally curious about the Seventh-day Adventist church, we invite you to listen in and be part of this conversation.
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- 00:03
- All right. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Cultish, Entering the Kingdom of the Cults. My name is
- 00:08
- Jeremiah Roberts, one of the co -hosts here. I'm super excited for today. I am joined by my trusted friend, co -host
- 00:16
- Super Sleuth. You are coming from a brand new super secret headquarters. Where are you dialing in from?
- 00:23
- Yeah, I'm dialing in from Eden, Utah right now, and I'm excited to talk about this great controversy.
- 00:29
- I don't know if anyone knows what I did there, but... It's all about back to Eden. Yes, yes. In fact,
- 00:35
- I'm pretty much assuming this podcast is going to be a great controversy in and of itself, given what we're going to cover today.
- 00:42
- We are joined by Colleen Tinker and Nikki Stevenson. It's great to have you on the program today.
- 00:48
- Thanks for having us. Good to be here. Okay. So it's here, ladies and gentlemen. It's finally here. Seventh -day
- 00:53
- Adventism. I'm so pumped. I cannot wait to have this conversation as of right now. Just real quick before you jump in, tell everyone just a little bit about yourselves, your background, and what makes the both of you a little bit of an expert on Seventh -day
- 01:06
- Adventism and Ellen G. White, which we're going to discuss today. Okay. Well, I'm Colleen Tinker.
- 01:12
- My husband and I left Adventism in about 1998, and by 2000, we were working with former
- 01:19
- Adventist Pastor Dale Ratzlaff, who founded Life Assurance Ministries with Proclamation Magazine.
- 01:26
- We were founding board members, and my husband designed the magazine from the beginning, and in 2004,
- 01:33
- I became its editor. In 2006, Richard became the president of Life Assurance Ministries, and we have had a ministry for questioning and former
- 01:44
- Adventists all these years, and also for concerned Christians. And our goal has been to help
- 01:51
- Adventists understand the gospel, and to help both Adventists and Christians understand
- 01:57
- Adventism. So the former Adventist podcast, which Nikki and I are the hosts of, began just before COVID, actually, in October of 2019.
- 02:08
- Okay. Yeah. So, I don't know, I cringe a little when
- 02:13
- I think of myself as an expert in Seventh -day Adventism. I don't have any significant training in Adventism because of just the way that I grew up, but I had to dig in and really unearth what
- 02:29
- Adventism taught, what I believed. I don't know how to quite explain what it's like to grow up in a cult, but you believe everything you're fed, and then slowly, a friend of ours refers to it as God punching holes in the darkness, and giving you truth, and you end up with the cognitive dissonance, and you've got to get to the bottom of it.
- 02:51
- And so, so much of what I learned about Adventism came through my own experience of climbing out of it and into orthodoxy.
- 03:00
- My husband and I took that journey together. His name's Carl. He is on Life Assurance Ministries' board, and we've been born again since 2010.
- 03:11
- Wow. That's awesome. Praise God. So, here's a question I have as we jump in, and this is chapter one of our conversation regarding Seventh -day
- 03:20
- Adventism. We are going to be kind of looking at kind of a historical linear timeline of Ellen G.
- 03:26
- White. We're going to be looking at some historical issues about who she was, how she came to be, how she really started one of the biggest religious groups, especially here in the
- 03:37
- United States. So, question. Right away, I mean, you made a distinction. We talked a little bit about this before the podcast.
- 03:44
- You're making a hard stance. You're making a distinction between Seventh -day Adventism and Christians.
- 03:51
- A lot of people will have the perception, okay, well, they're just kind of a stickler when it comes to celebrating the
- 03:57
- Sabbath on Saturday, or maybe they just got some weird ideas when it comes to eating meats versus eating vegetables.
- 04:04
- But it's bigger than that. So, before we jump in, explain a little bit of everyone, like the big zoom -out
- 04:10
- Google Maps picture, the overall worldview, because that's going to be helpful in understanding
- 04:15
- Ellen G. White and the growth of the Seventh -day Adventism movement. Explain the worldview element, if you can.
- 04:23
- Okay. We will probably tag -team this one. But it all began, as you know, with the
- 04:31
- Millerite movement. But Ellen White, unlike what most
- 04:37
- Christians think, is not the sole founder. She was one of three primary founders, and she was not the mover and shaker.
- 04:44
- She was like the cash cow, because she had the visions. The true movers and shakers were
- 04:50
- James White, Ellen's husband, who had an entrepreneurial gift, and his friend,
- 04:57
- Joseph Bates. Joseph Bates and James White came out of the movement called the
- 05:03
- Christian Connection. They became Millerites as people in the Christian Connection, and the
- 05:08
- Christian Connection is distinct, and I name that especially because it was staunchly anti -Trinitarian, as were
- 05:16
- Joseph Bates and James White. So everything that developed was developed around that anti -Trinitarian stance.
- 05:24
- The founders were anti -Trinitarian and Aryan or semi -Aryan. Ellen White was perhaps the exception, because she was raised
- 05:32
- Methodist, but I think she had no real theological convictions. She was more moved by the visions that she started having as a teenager.
- 05:41
- So this anti -Trinitarianism is what actually set the foundation for Adventism, and everything that grew out of it grew out of that, and that means that Adventism's physicalism, that humans have no spirit separate from the body, that God has a body.
- 06:00
- They don't tell you that, but internally they all know it. They have the idea that God has a body.
- 06:07
- Those things alter how people believe about sin, about salvation, about the nature of Christ, about what made him sinless, was he sinless or not.
- 06:16
- Adventism could never come to a consensus on that because Ellen White couldn't, because she didn't know how to explain it. So everything about the way
- 06:24
- Adventism sees reality is shifted because they don't believe in spirit, and they don't believe that God is truly triune.
- 06:34
- In spite of the fact that they have a sort of Trinitarian statement now, they've fixed that up to be publicly acceptable, but underneath it they do not believe that the three persons of the
- 06:43
- Trinity share substance, and they still teach that Jesus is not omnipresent because he has a body.
- 06:50
- That makes him not God. Nick, do you have any other thoughts as well too?
- 06:56
- Yeah, well, so all of these doctrines colored everything that she thought about God and about man, but there's also this overarching worldview that comes from a vision she had at a funeral, and this is where we get the great controversy worldview.
- 07:13
- In this vision, she saw into pre -creation history, and she saw
- 07:20
- Satan and Jesus in heaven. Jesus was elevated to sonship.
- 07:26
- Sonship, yes. Satan was jealous, and he started a rebellion in heaven, and he told all the angels,
- 07:34
- God's not fair. He wants you to keep a law that you can't keep, and it's actually pretty convoluted.
- 07:41
- I don't know how much you want me to get into it at this point, but because of his accusation that God isn't fair,
- 07:47
- God kicked him out of heaven, and there are watching worlds with people on the planet who are watching
- 07:56
- God on trial, so God is on trial, and we're going to all figure out if his law, which is the
- 08:01
- Decalogue that he gave apparently before he created man, we are going to find out if God's law is fair, and it's our job, the remnant of God, to uphold all 10 commandments, including the
- 08:14
- Sabbath, and to show that you can do this by the power of the Holy Spirit, who will come and go, depending on how good you are, and we're going to show that God's law can be kept, and that it is fair, and so when they say,
- 08:28
- I'm saved by Jesus dying on the cross, what they're saying is, he opened the door so that I could walk through and receive the
- 08:35
- Holy Spirit, and then try to keep his law, and there's so much more that goes into it. Okay. Jesus, of course, is the example to show us that the law can be kept, because if he was just like us, we can do what he did.
- 08:46
- Okay, so in other words, this isn't just some confusion about what you should and shouldn't eat, whether or not it's
- 08:52
- Saturday or Sunday. We're talking about private revelations. We're also talking about who
- 08:58
- God is, the distortion of that, because that affects our view of man. So we're talking about the absolute epicenter of what is the distinction between orthodoxy and cultism.
- 09:11
- Andrew, what questions do you want to jump in here before we kind of get into the historical timeline regarding this foundation as far as worldview specifically?
- 09:19
- Yeah, so how much more can you go into the Christian connection that James White and Joseph Bates were a part of?
- 09:26
- Was this something that came from the Restorationist movement that was going on in the Americas? Can you describe just a little bit to kind of talk about maybe the
- 09:34
- Second Great Awakening, and then the Restoration movement, and then the Christian connection just a little bit, just to build that atmosphere of what was going on in the
- 09:41
- Americas during that time? You know, I don't know a lot about that, because my study of it kind of started with James White and Joseph Bates.
- 09:49
- But I do know that the Restorationist movement has spawned several movements that are considered on the edge of cultic or quasi -cultic, including some of the churches of Christ, even the
- 10:02
- Christian church, which is probably considered Christian, but is pretty liberal. But the
- 10:08
- Restorationist movement was part of this idea that important truths had been lost, and God was raising up people to restore the lost truth.
- 10:18
- And Adventism's lost truths, of course, were the Seventh -day Sabbath and the Second Coming of Christ.
- 10:24
- Well, when you think about the history of Christianity, the Second Coming of Christ was never lost, and the truth about who
- 10:32
- Jesus is and what the Sabbath commandment was about was never lost. But in the frenzy of that 19th century, there was a lot of perversion and culticness.
- 10:44
- And I know that Ellen White came out of a very tumultuous, charismatic, spiritistic kind of movement in what they call the
- 10:54
- Burned Over District of Northeastern United States. She was part of that. And James White, with the whole
- 11:03
- Millerite frenzy, people were connected through the Millerite frenzy. And when that ended and Jesus didn't return, the people that coalesced and became
- 11:13
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- 12:16
- Enjoy the podcast. Yeah, when it comes to just what was going on around that time, it's always interesting to kind of look at what are some complementary historical sources that shed light on what was going on at the time during the growing of Ellen G.
- 12:30
- White. Phil Johnson from John MacArthur's church—I actually just listened to a message by him on Seventh -day
- 12:36
- Adventism—he had noted that the timeline in which Ellen G. White was coming to fruition, just the atmosphere, was very similar to the 1970s when
- 12:46
- Hal Lindsey wrote Late Great Planet Earth. There just have been times that are tumultuous with people really having an emphasis on the end times you had during the
- 12:55
- Hal Lindsey era, the 1970s. You had that on the curb of the year 2000. And I think even now, you're kind of experiencing now ever since 2020 with COVID and all the conversations about where the world is right now.
- 13:07
- Would you say that that was indicative of just when Ellen G. White was growing, just a lot of people had that on their mindset to make the
- 13:15
- Millerites an appealing movement? I think so. And I think it's also significant, you know,
- 13:22
- I can't explain to you exactly for sure how this is all put together, but I know that Joseph Bates—I'm sorry,
- 13:29
- I said the wrong word—Joseph Smith of the Mormons was killed in 1844,
- 13:34
- September, I believe. And it was four months later that Ellen White had her official first vision.
- 13:40
- And it's just not surprising to me that her great controversy vision has so much similarity to Mormonism's prehistory.
- 13:54
- There's some kind of connection between her and Mormonism. You know, there is some evidence that she had family members that died in Nauvoo, which was the
- 14:03
- Mormon city. There's some evidence. I mean, actually, it's a matter of historical record that there were a couple of men named
- 14:09
- Harmon—that was her maiden name—that worked in the press, the Mormon printing press that burned.
- 14:15
- So, we don't know for sure. Nobody's ever been able to firmly prove these connections, but there was a milieu.
- 14:23
- Okay. And then, of course, the Jehovah's Witnesses came out of that same milieu a little bit later. Oh, yeah, definitely.
- 14:29
- In fact, Andrew, both and I can attest that just over the four years we've been running this podcast, we see just this really accumulation culmination during the 1800s of so many different groups.
- 14:40
- So, jumping back to Seventh -day Adventism, I don't think you can fully understand Adventism just from what I've studied without understanding the
- 14:48
- Millerites. So, I think that needs to be briefly explained as a precursor, jumping into Ellen G. White.
- 14:54
- What's the best starting point for people to understand the Millerites? Where do we go from there?
- 15:00
- Well, I think that the Millerites—William Miller began—he was a
- 15:07
- Baptist minister, and I don't know what year he began preaching, but I do know that in the first half of the 19th century, he developed 15 proofs that he believed showed
- 15:19
- Jesus was going to come in 1843. So, he developed quite a following from all the denominations.
- 15:27
- I shouldn't say all, but a variety. It wasn't like it was just Methodists or just people.
- 15:35
- And he developed a following, and when Jesus didn't come in 1843, he had some people he was working with who helped him decide that, oh, no, it was really 1844, and they finally firmed it up to October 22.
- 15:50
- And Ellen White was a follower, along with her parents. They were Methodists of William Miller.
- 15:58
- So, it's interesting to me that William Miller had a rather huge—I mean, in New England, it was a huge following of people that expected
- 16:07
- Jesus to come. And on that night of October 22, they gathered. Some of them, you know, actually, they didn't harvest their potatoes.
- 16:16
- They didn't—they gave away their belongings and waited outside, and some of them in Ascension robes.
- 16:22
- And when he didn't come, it was devastating. People were devastated, and they also had lost so much of their own belongings and their income.
- 16:30
- I actually watched the—real quick, I actually watched as a precursor to this episode, the film that's put together by the
- 16:36
- Seventh -day Adventist Church on Ellen G. White, and they depict this. And that film very much has the aesthetic of a
- 16:43
- Hallmark film, but you do see them depict the great—the disappointment that people had.
- 16:49
- That would have been the great disappointment, correct? Yes, that was it. Okay. That was it.
- 16:58
- As far as depicting the end of the world and the return of Christ, what was the proof text?
- 17:03
- I mean, a lot of times people will go to Matthew 24. They'll have an interesting interpretation of the book of Daniel.
- 17:10
- Like, what was Miller's—what was his articulation for that?
- 17:16
- So, William Miller got this from Daniel 8, verse 14, the part that says, "...twenty
- 17:22
- -three hundred days, and then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." And he decided that these were years. And so he put together a math formula that landed him in 1843.
- 17:32
- And he began to submit articles with his theory to papers, and people began reading them.
- 17:38
- And this is how he drew people from so many different churches. They weren't necessarily organized, but they were all reading the same material.
- 17:44
- And so he was generating a following that way. And it was interesting to learn that the
- 17:52
- Christians, the Orthodox Christians, were growing weary of this movement. And they were submitting articles, and they were kind of harsh.
- 18:01
- And so this began to create this sense of, the Christians are Babylon. You need to come out of them and come join us.
- 18:09
- And so it all just began with this poor rendering of Daniel 8, verse 14, and then developed this us -and -them situation now.
- 18:19
- Yeah. You're familiar with Harold Camping? Yes. When I was watching this and just reading up a little, both the movie and also just reading a little about this particular situation, it reminded me a whole lot of that.
- 18:33
- Harold Camping had made similar arguments. He initially said that the world was going to end in 1994.
- 18:40
- If I'm not mistaken, it was either May of 2011, where he was doing the same thing, saying the
- 18:47
- Bible guarantees that the world will end. It was on billboards. People were standing out in Times Square.
- 18:55
- They got a lot of attention. That came and went. And he almost saw people experiencing a great disappointment.
- 19:00
- Do you see a similarity with that? Yeah. And there again, didn't he say that what actually happened, happened in heaven?
- 19:08
- Wasn't that how he explained away the date? That's usually what will happen when you have somebody using apocalyptic language or just using some sort of eschatology to say, this is the end times and also we're the
- 19:22
- Noah's Ark to join our group, to be in the know. Usually what will happen is that people, first there's a disappointment, obviously.
- 19:30
- People then double down and they'll try and explain it away or try and re -explain it for sure.
- 19:36
- Is that kind of what Miller did after people, what happened after that? How did people respond?
- 19:42
- Interestingly, William Miller himself eventually backpedaled and said he was wrong. And he kind of stopped preaching.
- 19:50
- He went into obscurity and died soon after. But most of the people that left the movement that were disappointed, many of them actually became agnostic and didn't return to church.
- 20:04
- Some of them did. It was a kind of a little minority group that coalesced and developed the
- 20:10
- Seventh -day Adventist movement out of it. And their argument was, oh no, we weren't wrong. The date was right.
- 20:17
- The event was wrong. And they created a whole doctrine, their central doctrine on the event that they believed to have truly happened.
- 20:27
- And it was something that happened in heaven, not on earth. But that was unique to the group that became Seventh -day
- 20:32
- Adventist. We recently read a chapter from a book in Proclamation Magazine.
- 20:41
- We have a weekly email and we have an online magazine. And we've been reprinting some older books.
- 20:46
- And there was a book by a woman named Clara Endicott Sears, who published a book in 1924.
- 20:54
- And she was using personal testimonies of people that had lived through the
- 21:00
- Great Disappointment. And Richard and I just recently read a chapter from that book where it was describing a young woman who had become so convinced that Jesus was coming that she had ended up becoming kind of insane and obsessed.
- 21:15
- And her fiancé, she left him. She was more concerned about Jesus coming than about marrying this man.
- 21:23
- And he couldn't get her to see any other way. Well, long story short, it took a while after Jesus didn't come.
- 21:30
- And it took some months. And she sort of calmed down. And he eventually did marry her quite a while later.
- 21:36
- But it just totally disrupted her life and his. So that was more the case than not among the people who were disappointed.
- 21:46
- It was the Adventists who decided they had to have an event. Okay. Nikki, do you have any other additional thoughts in regards to that?
- 21:53
- Well, it was interesting for me to learn coming out of Adventism that there were more of us than I knew.
- 21:59
- I thought we were the only ones, the Seventh -day Adventists. And so finding out that there were First -day
- 22:04
- Adventists that came out of that movement shocked me. And finding out that there were lots of different kinds of Seventh -day,
- 22:10
- Sabbatarian Adventists that came out of that movement shocked me. And it was interesting for me to learn also that they were against incorporating.
- 22:21
- They didn't want to become a formal group. So they came out with all kinds of magazines.
- 22:26
- They were really big on producing literature. And you see this in the Jehovah's Witness group.
- 22:32
- There are endless lists here of periodicals that were printed during that time.
- 22:39
- And they had this conference in Albany, New York, where the Adventists gathered to discuss.
- 22:45
- I think there were 61 delegates. And they gathered to discuss, okay, what now? Millerite. Miller was wrong.
- 22:50
- What do we do with the Millerite movement now? And at that conference, they determined that the shut door, which came out of that vision about what happened in heaven, the shut door wasn't something that they were going to promote.
- 23:04
- They didn't believe it. And that Sabbatarians were fanatics. And so you had this really big split between the
- 23:11
- First -day Adventists and the Seventh -day Adventists. And the Seventh -day Adventist group fell, of course, into this fanatic stuff.
- 23:18
- And the other thing with the Millerite movement that fascinated me was learning that Ellen White was only 13 years old when she started going to these meetings, listening to William Miller talk.
- 23:28
- And he would talk about the end of the world coming. And she was terrified and tortured at night. And she thought that she wasn't going to make it.
- 23:35
- And so much of her frenzy and they would pass out. They'd fall on the floor.
- 23:40
- They'd speak in tongues. They'd go into trances. A lot of that was kind of whipped up and made worse by her fear and her anxiety.
- 23:48
- She wasn't the only woman at that time who claimed to have visions. Oh, no, for sure. Yeah, that's fascinating.
- 23:54
- Because in the time that we've done this podcast and the dozens of conversations we've had with people, we see a commonality of people, especially when they grow up in a cult or a cultish -like infrastructure, when they're hearing about all these end times visions and the end of the world.
- 24:09
- It's very difficult as a child to try and process through that. I can't imagine the fear and the trauma that comes from that.
- 24:17
- Andrew, you're the super sleuth. You've done a lot of sleuthing the last four years.
- 24:22
- You of the Millerites has always come up. You're the one who's always brought it up when you're doing research around this area, even when we've explored other groups like Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons or a lot of these other 18th century apocalyptic cults.
- 24:37
- Andrew, with all your research, what questions do you have for Colleen? Yes, some questions
- 24:44
- I have are with regards to doctrines, essentially, that are starting to form at this time after the
- 24:51
- Great Disappointment. You said something as in the shut door, right? So during my research, it's really hard for me to understand, well, what happened?
- 24:59
- There was an open door and then a shut door, then we have the age of accountability doctrines after that with Ellen G.
- 25:06
- White. Can you explain for us, first of all, where did they get the idea that this was an invisible type of spiritual thing, maybe in heaven, that happened with Jesus in 1844?
- 25:19
- And then how did these doctrines, these core doctrines develop after that? Because you like to talk about worldview and presuppositions, right?
- 25:27
- There's something that happened where this stuff didn't come out of the vacuum. It came from a person, right?
- 25:33
- So can you explain this, bring us into that? What happened right after 1844, Great Disappointment? Well, first of all,
- 25:39
- I can't speak to how it happened for these other splinter groups that actually ended up being smaller, except for the
- 25:46
- Jehovah's Witnesses. I can't speak to how any of that played out there. I only know how it played out in Seventh -day
- 25:53
- Adventism. But I do know that the day after the Great Disappointment, there was an
- 26:01
- Adventist, and I'm going to call him Adventist with a small a because they weren't formally Seventh -day Adventists yet.
- 26:06
- And as Tim Martin, who did that video that Nikki mentioned earlier,
- 26:12
- Root Shoots and Those in Cahoots, that explain all the groups that came out of the Millerite movement, he uses that small a
- 26:19
- Adventist to describe all of them, including the Jehovah's Witnesses. So this man named
- 26:25
- Hiram Edson was an Adventist who knew the Whites, who knew Joseph Bates, and he was praying to understand what had gone wrong.
- 26:33
- And he was walking literally through a cornfield, and suddenly he says it was like heaven opened, and he saw before him what really happened.
- 26:42
- And he saw that Jesus had left the holy place and had entered the most holy place, and he had there commenced the great investigative judgment that was going to end in the sanctuary being cleansed, which had been
- 26:57
- William Miller's proof text, right? Daniel 8, 14, and 2300 days, and then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.
- 27:03
- So his vision showed him that it was the heavenly sanctuary, not the earthly sanctuary, and that Jesus had moved from literally thinking sanctuary, tabernacle in the
- 27:17
- Old Testament, using that idea from the holy place into the most holy place, like on the day of atonement.
- 27:23
- And this was the beginning of Jesus cleansing the sanctuary by going through the recorded sins of the saved to see if they'd been confessed or not.
- 27:33
- And that's what brings about the shut door doctrine, right? Because that's when you went in there, the door is shut.
- 27:38
- Anyone born after 1844 now can't be essentially saved, supposedly. Can you bring us into that thought process?
- 27:45
- You know, all of that is a little murky, and jump in anytime. But here's the thing that I do know.
- 27:53
- Ellen White started having visions about this. And the thing that's important for me at this point to know, especially if you're dealing with current
- 28:01
- Adventists, is that they are actually downplaying Higher Medicine's vision. And that was a little bit startling to us recently when we realized that in public writings, they don't mention him, or if they do, they don't call it a vision.
- 28:20
- But it is a matter of historic record that it was a vision. And I learned it was a vision in Adventist school.
- 28:28
- I can picture the art in my head. We saw it in our children's books. Yeah. It was there in the art.
- 28:34
- So Ellen White started having these visions. And here's where it sort of, it was an interesting thing, because she started saying that the preachers, the
- 28:45
- Christian preachers who rejected William Miller's date setting, and then abandoned it, neither, you know, they didn't accept it.
- 28:52
- She said they were lost. That only those who accepted this message that she endorsed through her own vision that Higher Medicine had had.
- 29:03
- And then she conveniently came up later with a confirming vision. And this is where the confusion comes in, because Ellen White didn't have that initial vision.
- 29:13
- It was Higher Medicine. And then come to find out, there was another man named Crozier, C -R -O -Z -I -E -R, who had written a rather extensive paper about this idea.
- 29:24
- And it turns out that Ellen White had had access to his paper and had had an opportunity, actually, where she could have read it.
- 29:32
- It's a matter of record that she could have read it. She denied reading it, but there is evidence that she did read it.
- 29:37
- And then after that, she had the vision that said, oh, yes, this is truth. This is God's truth.
- 29:43
- So anybody who rejects this, and it had come to her from God, anybody who rejects this vision is not saved.
- 29:52
- And so from now on, she set a new date. After 1844, she set several more dates, including 1848,
- 30:01
- I believe, 1851. And Jesus was still going to come. So get busy, stick with us, stick to these dates.
- 30:10
- Nobody else can come in because they've rejected this vision. They've rejected this information. They're not saved.
- 30:15
- But the problem was that as these dates came and went and no Jesus, well, what are these
- 30:21
- Adventists going to do? They're having children. Can they be saved? They're getting married.
- 30:27
- Will their children be saved? Will their spouses be saved? So they had to keep, the door kept cracking open until finally the shut door dissipated.
- 30:37
- And it was like an embarrassing piece of history that we don't want to talk about. Sorry for interrupting your currently scheduled programming, but did you know you can go to ApologiaStudios .com
- 30:46
- and become an all access member? With all access membership, you get exclusive content from all of Apologia Studios productions, not to mention
- 30:54
- Kultish is an Apologia Studios production. So you'll get access to Kultish, The Aftermath, where Jerry and I talk together after our most recent series, discussing what we thought.
- 31:04
- It's really cool. We have a lot of fun doing it. And, you know, we can't do this without the studio.
- 31:09
- It keeps the lights on. And we can't also do this without you. So please go to ApologiaStudios .com
- 31:15
- and become an all access member. Now back to the programming. Well, even during the Hal Lindsey era,
- 31:20
- I mean, you think about, you know, this is, you have in -house eschatological debates. You have
- 31:26
- Christians who differ. You have like post mill, you have all mill, you have pre -mill. You have in -house conversations where people can disagree as brothers and sisters.
- 31:34
- What I'm seeing though, with this though, would the distinct, the categorical distinction between what
- 31:42
- Ellen G. White, the Millerites, well Ellen G. White specifically, is that instead of really doing exegesis, you're actually appealing to a private revelation, a special private esoteric understanding of the book of Daniel versus exegesis, but then also creating have and have nots, using as a catalyst to be the arbiter of who's saved and who's not.
- 32:05
- Is that kind of what was going on with the formulation of Seventh -day Adventism at that time? Well, I think so.
- 32:10
- Yes, I do. And interestingly, what you said about doing eisegesis instead of exegesis is actually very much to the point.
- 32:19
- And I find it really fascinating. I didn't know this until quite a while after I had actually left
- 32:24
- Adventism, that, you know, because we were always told all our doctrines are founded on the
- 32:30
- Bible. Everything comes from the Bible. None of it came from Ellen White. Of course, we all knew internally that Ellen White's interpretation of the
- 32:39
- Bible was how we understood the Bible. We all knew that. So it was fascinating to me to discover that in the book.
- 32:49
- Sorry. That's all right. This book, interesting name, right? Lightbearers to the
- 32:55
- Remnant. This book has been, I don't know if it still is, but it was for years, the official denominational or organizational history book of the
- 33:05
- Seventh -day Adventist organization used at their seminary, Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan.
- 33:12
- And this book recounts in a lot of detail the movement of those founders and how they came about to organize.
- 33:22
- And they say in here that Ellen White, well, actually, it says that the men would hammer out the doctrines.
- 33:29
- And I think it's so significant that I, do you mind if I read a tiny quote? It's not. Yeah, go ahead. Okay. This is in this book.
- 33:37
- It says, this experience, and this is referring to what had already come forth in this book, has shed light on the
- 33:47
- Sabbatarian Adventists and how they arrived at their doctrinal positions. They were hammered out as the result of Bible study, discussion, and prayer.
- 33:57
- Of course, that's the denominational line. Much of the time Ellen White testified, she could not understand the texts under discussion and the issues involved.
- 34:08
- Yet she later remembered that when the brethren who were studying, quote, came to the point where they said, we can do nothing more.
- 34:17
- The spirit of the Lord would come upon me. I would be taken off in vision and a clear explanation of the passages we had been studying would be given me with instruction as to how we were to labor and teach effectively.
- 34:31
- And I find this to be really interesting because the participants quote, because the participants knew that when not in vision,
- 34:44
- I could not understand these matters. They accepted as light direct from heaven, the revelations given.
- 34:50
- Can you still hear us? Yes. Okay. So the fact is she couldn't understand the
- 34:59
- Bible, men hammering out the doctrines couldn't understand the Bible. And the only way they could come to any solution was for her to have a vision.
- 35:08
- And they knew it was from God because it came in a vision. And when she wasn't in vision, she couldn't understand the Bible. And all
- 35:14
- Christians know that when they are born again, the Holy Spirit makes the Bible available, accessible, and understandable.
- 35:21
- They were not Christians. But that's how their doctrines were formed. And that is their official teaching in spite of what they tell outsiders.
- 35:30
- Yeah. How do people who are Seventh -day Adventist pastors, apologists, when you would make that claim, how do they explain or address that from your perspective?
- 35:48
- What would they say? They, you know, they generally don't directly address that.
- 35:55
- They will sidestep it. It's interesting. It's a little bit like a politician.
- 36:02
- They will reframe the question you might ask them and say, well, all of our beliefs are from the
- 36:09
- Bible. Yes, Ellen White was significant. She had a role to play with the founders.
- 36:14
- She was a message and a voice from God when an early movement was struggling and needed direction.
- 36:22
- But we didn't need her for our doctrines. Our doctrines are from the Bible. Yes, she did have visions about them, but it was to help the struggling young church.
- 36:31
- They sidestep her. They discount her. And yet they will not give her up. They'll talk differently to insiders than they will to outsiders.
- 36:40
- Right. I got a question. Just to flip it to kind of what's going on in the modern days in the
- 36:48
- SDA. Why was Ellen White having visions then? And why aren't anyone having visions now?
- 36:57
- Well, there's a good question. Essentially, Ellen White's been canonized in the
- 37:02
- Adventist church. Even as she was dying, they asked her, do you have a successor? Has God told you who's going to take your place?
- 37:09
- And she said that he hadn't given her any light on that, but that her words will live till the end of time and they'll get the people through to the end.
- 37:20
- She even said her words were alive and would speak to the people as long as time would last. You know what's interesting though?
- 37:27
- This is a matter of record as well, not often talked about, but she kind of stopped having visions when she hit menopause.
- 37:35
- After that, she had her dreams and her handsome young man that would come to her. Really? Handsome young man?
- 37:42
- What do you mean? Well, that's what she said. She said she had a handsome young man that would be her angel guide and would come and reveal things to her at night.
- 37:52
- And there were stories. I mean, you know, you can say, how do we know?
- 37:57
- But at her home, which is kind of a shrine at Elms Haven, California, and she has another one in Battle Creek, Michigan.
- 38:05
- On the tours that they give, there have been people, not so many now because they're dying off, but who had, in decades past, they had guides who had actually worked for her and been in the house with her and said they would see a light coming under her doorway at night.
- 38:21
- And that's it. And that's printed. That's a matter of record as well. Wow. So how do people weigh these things, right?
- 38:31
- Because when I'm thinking about it, it doesn't seem to me that the
- 38:37
- Bible is the sole rule of infallible faith and practice, but instead that there's been an interpretation through LNG White that people are believing, but they may not even understand that it's actually
- 38:47
- LNG White and some of these visions and dreams that she had that is causing them to interpret the
- 38:53
- Bible in a different way, a way that's not actually like a biblical hermeneutic.
- 38:58
- So what happens to the person then when they start reading the Bible and they're like,
- 39:04
- I'm not seeing the investigative judgment anywhere, right? Like I'm not seeing how Jesus went because he went to the most holy of holy places when, you know, he was up in heaven for me.
- 39:14
- He's interceded as my high priest ever since the death, burial and resurrection. So how does this thought process work out?
- 39:22
- It varies. I would say that this problem that you just now mentioned is the source of the worldview.
- 39:32
- The fact that most Adventists don't know that LNG White isn't the source of the doctrines and they think it is the
- 39:39
- Bible, but they've been taught the LNG White interpretation is what forms this worldview in Adventists from almost like with their mother's milk.
- 39:48
- It's as if you come out and when you're taught how to interpret reality, you're taught that that sky is green and you hear people saying it's blue and you go, oh,
- 39:56
- I know better. That color, that color is green. So they don't know that that interpretation is coming from her.
- 40:04
- But some people look at the Bible with, you know, having been taught to understand it through her lens, some people look at it and just say, it's too confusing to me.
- 40:18
- Brighter minds than mine have figured this out. I'll just let it go because I'm too stupid to understand.
- 40:24
- And I have heard people say that. I had a friend who was a very bright woman who'd spent her life teaching.
- 40:29
- And she said, when I retire, I'll look into it. But brighter minds than mine have figured this out. And I just don't know what to do with it.
- 40:36
- Yeah. And that's often what we hear from our family when we leave Adventism and we learn the gospel and we come back and we're like, guys, there's this really great news.
- 40:44
- And we tell them that you can know that you've been saved because it is all a work of Christ.
- 40:50
- They'll push back and say, how can you honestly think that you know better than our theologians and people who have believed this for hundreds of years?
- 40:59
- You think you know better. And we get kind of a covert shutting. It's not quite like Jehovah's Witnesses, which
- 41:04
- I personally have said would be easier. Easier. You'd know what it is. In some ways. And I say that naively, not having experienced that as a
- 41:12
- Jehovah's Witness, but it's really tough what happens in families. And so the idea that a person can know their
- 41:19
- Savior has saved them and that that's done is a very arrogant, a very arrogant position from the
- 41:28
- Adventist perspective, because you have to be perfected to be saved or to know that you're saved. You have to keep the law perfectly and the
- 41:35
- Sabbath, of course. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to almost have this humility in Adventism as having a posture of not being capable of understanding.
- 41:44
- And I don't know if you guys know the BITE model well. Stephen has put it out. Very familiar. We've talked through that for with one of our podcast episodes.
- 41:53
- And just for our audience, can you explain, just tell everyone in case it isn't aware of Sia Hassan's work, explain just the categories of the
- 42:00
- BITE model. And just very, very, very briefly, we'll probably expand this in other episodes, how that fits
- 42:06
- Steve Hassan's BITE model real quickly. Sure. I'll see if I can remember what the acronym was for, but it is an acronym for the different ways that a cultic group will seek to control its people.
- 42:18
- And the B is behavior control. The I, I believe is information control, information control.
- 42:25
- T is thought control. And E is emotional, emotional control.
- 42:31
- Yeah, thank you. And so it's interesting because as an Adventist, I would have said they don't control those things.
- 42:38
- I would have too. But you don't. It's the most unreal thing coming out of a group like this.
- 42:45
- It's so hard to explain what it's like, but you have this, this natural kind of way of functioning and thinking that is a hundred percent from the group.
- 42:54
- You just don't know it. You don't, you have no idea. You don't realize how much power you put in their hands and in their writing and their literature.
- 43:02
- And you don't know until you leave. That's true. And, you know, interestingly, there are a few people that respond differently to this main way we've talked about.
- 43:13
- And a prime example of that happened in 1980 with Desmond Ford, who is fairly well known among some
- 43:21
- Adventists. Although, interestingly, Nikki, when you attended La Sierra University taking a master's in religion, you'd never heard of him.
- 43:29
- I hadn't. I pressed it. Well, I remember hearing some people talk about him, but I wasn't, I wasn't familiar with his name.
- 43:36
- They don't. I didn't know that this ministry existed. I only came in 2010. I had never heard of Life Assurance Ministries, Dale Ratzlaff, Proclamation Magazine, and I live 10 miles away from them.
- 43:48
- And I went to a local Adventist congregation just up the street. Things are kept quiet.
- 43:54
- But we had no idea. You're very insulated. So people such as Desmond Ford do study the
- 44:00
- Bible and say, and he, you know, knew the original languages and was a brilliant scholar. And it's going, wait a minute, the investigative judgment isn't here.
- 44:08
- He did present a big paper to the denominational leaders in 1980, showing irrefutably that scripture not only didn't support it, but actually denied that doctrine, which is their core doctrine.
- 44:22
- And he was defrocked. He was no longer permitted to preach. He was not actually cast out of the church, but he was denied a platform.
- 44:32
- He was shut. He was silenced. Okay. Yeah. And I think we're going to explore that as well, too, in this, this is, so this is part one of chapter one, talking about seven -day
- 44:43
- Adventist through the lines of Ellen G. White. We will explore that further in chapter two.
- 44:49
- So jumping back, and that's really great insight. Jumping back to Ellen G. White, what
- 44:55
- I found fascinating is this is one of the most prominent religious movements of the 18th century.
- 45:02
- This is also during a time when you're looking at a very patriarchal era of the
- 45:08
- United States. In fact, it wasn't until really the very end of Ellen G. White's where women got the right to vote.
- 45:14
- It wasn't until, it was June 4th, 1919. It was ratified on August 14th, 1920, where they had the 19th amendment where women could vote.
- 45:23
- What was the nature, like, how did Ellen G. White grow such prominence? Was it the relationship with her, was it her husband's
- 45:31
- James that was kind of like the promoter for her? Or how did that work? Because I mean, I just think the cultural aesthetic will be like, okay, well, she's having visions.
- 45:39
- There's other women, you said, too, who are having visions. Like, how did she grow to prominence in a cultural climate like that?
- 45:46
- Well, the way it looks to us as we go back and read the history is, number one, there were, within that charismatic craziness of New England and in parts of other, other parts of the world as well, there was a plethora of people that sprang up and claimed to be prophets, both men and women.
- 46:07
- So out of the same milieu came Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. She had a huge following.
- 46:15
- And interestingly, by the way, she also, her followers did not eat pork, like, you know,
- 46:22
- Ellen White's followers couldn't eat pork. There was also a woman in England during that time, whose name was, sorry,
- 46:33
- Mrs. Joanna Southcott. And she was a Sabbatarian as well. And her years were, she actually was about a century earlier, actually.
- 46:44
- She came in the middle of the 18th century, but she had a huge following and finally died in self -delusion in 1814.
- 46:52
- But her followers at one time numbered 100 ,000 and they continued until 1831.
- 47:00
- And they continued until 1831 to observe the seventh day Sabbath. So Ann Lee and the
- 47:07
- Shakers was another one. She actually is the one who opposed the use of pork.
- 47:12
- I'm sorry. So there was, there were, she wasn't unique in the fact that she was a woman, but how did she rise to prominence?
- 47:18
- That was all James. And the fact is that from this Millerite milieu and all of this visionary craziness that Ellen White came from, somehow she and James connected in these
- 47:31
- Millerite movements. And he, I believe he found her visions useful because he began to travel with her before they were married and they were close to a decade apart in age.
- 47:43
- And she would have visions and he would draw the crowds and he would manage the meetings.
- 47:49
- And I remember reading early on, as we came out of Adventism, a letter written by an early
- 47:56
- Millerite who wanted to see Ellen White in action. She had heard about her and she knew she was coming to a specific place.
- 48:02
- And she went to watch and listen to James and Ellen, and she watched
- 48:08
- Ellen have a vision and she described how it happened. And she said, you know, she went into this trance and she did her usual glory, glory, glory thing.
- 48:15
- And then she said in her letter, I watched James direct her vision and then call her out of it when he was done.
- 48:28
- So he was her manager. And then when things began to get more confusing, and it was interesting because after the great disappointment, there were a lot of meetings where people would have charismatic excesses.
- 48:46
- And there's one that's actually a matter of public trial record. I mean, you can find this online now.
- 48:52
- There's the transcript from the trial called the Daman trial. And Ellen White and James White were both present there.
- 48:58
- And it was so noisy, so out of control, so close to an orgy that the neighbors called the police and they actually had a trial for the homeowner,
- 49:07
- Israel Daman. And it's on record. It's online. You can read the testimony from that trial.
- 49:15
- And it was after that that Ellen's mother said, you and James need to get married.
- 49:21
- This is not looking good. So they did. And as time went on, he published her visions and made a lot of money selling them to the early
- 49:32
- Adventists. And there was a point later before his death. He died actually probably three decades before she did.
- 49:39
- But he said to her at one point in a letter, there is still much money in our pens.
- 49:46
- We've got to keep doing this. So he would publish her visions and her writings and her counsels and made a lot of money and controlled a lot of people.
- 49:55
- So she came to prominence because she was like the cash cow for the entrepreneur.
- 50:01
- And Joseph Bates, the other central founder, was the person who put up the money initially for the printing, a lot of the printing, a lot of the organization.
- 50:11
- Nikki, what are your thoughts? Yeah, well, that the Joseph Bates dynamic is a big part of this because he wanted them to endorse his perspective on the
- 50:20
- Sabbath. He wanted to turn them Seventh -day Sabbath or Sabbatarians. And so he had come to them with this doctrine and they didn't really see any importance in it.
- 50:31
- But somehow they came to an agreement where she would support his doctrine and he would support her visions.
- 50:37
- And his doctrine included the idea that they would keep Sabbath from 6 p .m. to 6 p .m. That was for whatever reason, the time frame that they came up with.
- 50:46
- So she had a vision and she was taken up to heaven. And Jesus took her to the
- 50:51
- Ark of the Covenant and opened it up and showed her the Ten Commandments. And there was a halo around the fourth. And so she said, he wants us keeping the
- 50:58
- Sabbath. And they kept it from 6 to 6 until this got corrected later, at which point you wonder why
- 51:04
- Jesus didn't tell her that it's actually from sundown to sundown if you're going to keep the Jewish Sabbath. This is like Raiders of the
- 51:10
- Lost Ark, except in the third heaven. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah. And it's funny because it's all very physical.
- 51:16
- It's all very physical. There is, in fact, is it Doug Batchelor, who has a video that shows you traveling from earth through the belt of Orion, which is where heaven is, and into heaven and up into the throne room where you see the
- 51:30
- Decalogue. It's a very real thing to them. I used to gaze at Orion. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we all did.
- 51:36
- Yeah. We have a friend who's an astronomer who is involved with, he's a writer and a board member for Life Assurance Ministries, and he's a great amateur astronomer.
- 51:44
- But he said everywhere he goes, when he used to speak to Adventists a lot, they would always say, can you show us
- 51:50
- Orion? Because that's where Jesus is coming back. Heaven is up through that nebula.
- 51:57
- So as they're working with Bates, James White is helping to establish the college, the printing presses, the sanitarium with Kellogg, and he slowly starts to realize that there are other people who are gaining his wife's ear, and he's losing control over her.
- 52:17
- And that becomes a point of conflict. James White became concerned that he didn't have his wife's ear like some of these other people did.
- 52:29
- And yeah, so they used her and her visions to get money from people. They had the system called the
- 52:37
- Benevolent System where people would determine how much money. What was it called?
- 52:46
- Systematic Benevolence. Systematic Benevolence. Yes. So they just used her to get her visions and to get money out of the
- 52:53
- Adventists. Yeah. Yeah, just real quickly, I've known
- 53:00
- Andrew now for four years, and we've done a lot of different podcasts together. I'm very good at reading
- 53:05
- Andrew's body language, even over Zoom, when his mind's being blown. So Andrew, I see your head spinning.
- 53:12
- What's on your mind with everything that they're saying right now? Yeah. No, I just had a question. I remember you mentioned it way earlier.
- 53:19
- I don't want to derail us so far off topic, but you said they're looking at Orion and things of that nature.
- 53:24
- Even earlier, you said it's all purely physical. They're interested with other worlds. So is there the thought process that God's on another planet right now?
- 53:34
- What is heaven then in the SDA if it's not this spiritual place? That's a good question.
- 53:39
- Oh, it's not spiritual. Believe me, it's very physical. Yeah. And that is part of the doctrine of the investigative judgment.
- 53:47
- Now, nobody knows, including Adventists, where heaven is, but they know it's through Orion. And they believe and teach their children that Jesus will come back through the gateway of Orion.
- 53:58
- And as a child, I used to look up and we're told, you know, it's right above that. We were told how to locate it.
- 54:05
- The Dipper, right? It was in the Dipper. Well, it was in the Orion sword and up above the Orion sword. And we'd gaze at that and think, okay, heaven is in there.
- 54:15
- And then we'd hear pastors saying, well, you know, there's been changes. They can see colors.
- 54:21
- They can see movement up in that hole up in the middle of Orion. Jesus will be coming soon.
- 54:26
- Of course, he won't come until there's a little black cloud the size of a man's hand, but it will come through Orion.
- 54:33
- So heaven is physical. There's a literal physical building up there built like the tabernacle.
- 54:40
- And they know that because Hebrews says that Moses was given a pattern after which he was to build the sanctuary in the desert.
- 54:50
- And so Adventists say that that is a literal physical tabernacle and that that literal physical tabernacle is literally physically defiled by sins.
- 55:02
- That when a person on earth accepts Jesus, whatever that means, Adventists are never totally clear on what that means to accept
- 55:10
- Jesus. But you know, yes, Jesus, I want to serve you, whatever. At that point, Jesus's blood removes your sin from you and transfers that sin literally into the books of heaven where its record remains.
- 55:27
- And Jesus, who's up there doing that investigative judgment now in real time, dressed like an
- 55:33
- Old Testament high priest just by the way, is going through the books of record, and he's seeing which of those sins have actually been confessed.
- 55:44
- So if a person has accepted Jesus and has confessed their sins,
- 55:49
- Jesus writes forgiven beside that sin. But that is not a permanent forgiveness.
- 55:58
- That's a provisional forgiveness. If you don't confess everything between the point of that sin and the end of your life, you have lost.
- 56:08
- And they actually teach, Ellen White said, that the person whose sins are confessed and forgiven are on probation.
- 56:15
- She literally says that they're on probation. And when the investigative judgment is done, when your life is ended and Jesus finishes going through your book of record, if all your sins are confessed, he will then change that word forgiven to the word pardoned.
- 56:29
- Yeah. And so then you'll be OK to say, but you won't know because you'll be dead.
- 56:35
- You don't know when you die. So in the end, literally and truly, Jesus takes that sin and places it on Satan, who is the scapegoat, who bears the sin into the lake of fire and is punished for it.
- 56:47
- Does that sound like there's the wrong sin bearer? Well, there is. And that is how heaven is cleansed.
- 56:56
- And all of that is not symbolic. It's literal. So help me explain this for me then.
- 57:04
- If I look at the 28 articles of the SDA church, one of them says, number 19, it says, salvation is all of grace and not of works, and its fruit is obedience to the commandments.
- 57:17
- This obedience develops Christian character and results in a sense of well -being. It sounds like Orthodox Christian belief, even some of the verses that are being cited here.
- 57:26
- But what do they really mean? I think it's the second article of faith from the LDS say, we believe that all mankind may be saved through the atonement of Jesus Christ by obedience to the gospel ordinances and principles, kind of like shadowed in the same light, maybe.
- 57:39
- Can you explain then? Because what you explained just now seems totally opposite to what their number 19 states on their website.
- 57:48
- So how can you explain it then that there's actually a difference of what's going on? Hey, what's up, everyone?
- 57:55
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- 58:03
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- 58:23
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- 58:38
- Back to the show. I'm looking at the notes we have in our Seventh -day
- 58:43
- Adventist belief. Interestingly, this is the book that they published to explain their 28 fundamental beliefs.
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- It is available only in print form. It is not online, as is so much of their stuff.
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- Unless you know it's there, you wouldn't even know to look for it. So it's primarily an insider book for members.
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- So this is a book just to—I think when you look at cults or specifically cultist groups, and you look at primary resources that accurately represent the movement, usually when you have pieces of literature written for potential converts, there's levels and layers of which—for example, if you look at Mormonism, when you look, they have the missionary lessons, if missionaries come knocking at your doors, specifically, you know,
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- I think that the five lessons that they go through, there's a difference between something that's written from the
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- Mormon apostle or from the Mormon prophet to the Mormons. What would this book then—would this represent something written by Seventh -day
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- Adventists for Seventh -day Adventists? Well, absolutely. It's put together by the
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- Ministerial Society of the General Conference, and it is for members. So if anybody—I mean,
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- I know I'm almost certain this podcast, again, is going to be a great controversy, quote -unquote, in and of itself.
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- If, for example, if we get somebody, a Seventh -day Adventist pastor or somebody representing the organization, more than likely, however, they would view this book as authoritative?
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- Yes. Okay. Just clarifying. So did you have something you wanted to say about that?
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- You said Fundamental Belief No. 19, is that correct? On the law of God? Yes. Right. Well, she's looking for the things that she has in mind there, because we have things marked from having done the podcast series on these beliefs.
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- I'll just, in general, address this. When they say they're saved by grace and that—I don't remember the exact wording, but the idea is that it bears the fruit of good deeds, of righteousness, or law -keeping.
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- The understanding for an Adventist is the fruit of being saved by grace is keeping the
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- Ten Commandments, and that requires the fourth, Saturday, Sabbath. So if you're not doing that, you're not showing the fruit.
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- And then the saved by grace thing, that is not what Christians mean. For an
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- Adventist to say we're saved by grace, they generally mean it's not ever well -defined to an
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- Adventist, ever. But what they mean is Jesus was so gracious that He came down and died a representative death to show us what
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- God's judgment on sin would look like. And I say that with full authority, because I have just looked at the
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- Sabbath school lesson for their—the Adventists produce a quarterly of lessons every quarter of the year that goes all around the world, and it's a way of teaching their doctrines to every member in the world.
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- Every member in the world gets the same lesson on the same week. That's another insider thing.
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- So I just did a commentary for our email newsletter which addresses the
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- Sabbath school lesson each week, and I had just seen one where the teacher's comments were using that very word, that Jesus died a representative death to demonstrate
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- God's judgment on sin. No, Jesus died a substitutionary death. He literally became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God.
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- But an Adventist doesn't understand that. Jesus was just like them. Jesus did not have a human spirit.
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- He was not—you know, there's no understanding of being dead in sin. There's only understanding of having inherited propensities to do evil through your genetic inheritance.
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- So Jesus came and showed that the law could be kept, and He graciously took that horrible offense of death on a cross so that we could see the lengths to which
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- He would go, the lengths to which He would suffer without complaining, and to show us that this is the result if you don't get your act together and be good.
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- So the grace is that Jesus did this horrible self -abnegating death to show us,
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- A, how bad we are, B, how good He was, and C, that, you know, if we get it together,
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- He'll help us keep the law. That, to an Adventist, is what they mean is that we're saved by grace. Yeah.
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- Just—go ahead. I was just going to say part of what's difficult about knowing how to talk about this, we did an entire series on the 28
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- Fundamental Beliefs on our podcast. It's hard to answer these quickly because there's a method to how they twist language.
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- So that they can use Christian words, and the Christians will hear them, and they'll nod along, and the
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- Adventists will hear them through how they've been trained to hear them, and they'll nod along, and everyone looks like we're saying the same thing.
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- I had no idea how different grace was, justification, redemption.
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- I didn't know what regeneration even was. I didn't know what it meant to be born again.
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- I didn't know any of that as an Adventist. They were just flowery, pretty words describing some metaphor.
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- I didn't get it. Everything's metaphor. So you'll read this summary of a
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- Fundamental Belief, but then if you have this book, the chapter is going to flesh it out according to Ellen and Adventism's worldview.
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- They're going to say, but this doesn't mean this, and this doesn't mean that. And as you read it, you're going to see straw man arguments.
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- The Christians say this, but that's ridiculous. And then they'll explain what they actually mean by it.
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- So you come out of that chapter hearing it now the way that they mean it, and no longer the way that a
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- Christian will read it and understand it. Yeah, no, that's really good. In fact, what we're going to do is
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- I think what we're seeing here as we wrap up here is that the complexity behind the nuance behind the language barrier and the worldview comes from this complex syncretistic nature of combining
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- Ellen G. White's end times visions and her idea, but also sort of intermixing private revelation, also combining that with an have and have nots when it comes to soteriology, but also trying to re -explain on some level, at least on many different levels, the essentials of Christ's divinity.
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- So I think from there, at least from my understanding, that's what you're kind of seeing. So we'll definitely go into that in part two of our conversation.
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- So I'm going to leave this on a cliffhanger. I'm going to give some, I'm going to ask this question at the beginning of part two. There's a lot of photos of Ellen G.
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- White. There's one specifically, you know the picture. It's the one where James White is in a chair.
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- Ellen G. White is standing up with her hand on his shoulder. I have a thought about that question, but I'm going to save that for part two.
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- Leave everyone on a cliffhanger too. So thank you again so much for coming on. Just one last time as we wrap up here, where can people find out more about you and the ministry that you do?
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- If you go to proclamationmagazine .com, you can sign up for our weekly email newsletter.
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- You'll find all of our archived articles there. You'll find links to our YouTube, our former Adventist YouTube channel, links to our former
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- Adventist podcast, and also links to our print magazines, which are now online.
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- So everything we've produced is accessible through proclamationmagazine .com.
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- And there's many links from there. Okay. Excellent. All right, everyone.
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- Thank you. The wait is over. The Seventh -Day Adventism series is here. Thank you all for hanging out and enjoying part one.
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- And go ahead. The comment section is yours. Head to our social media. Let us know what you thought. Let us know what you thought about part one.
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- If you agreed, if you disagreed, let us know. Hit us up in the DMs. We're so excited.
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- This has been long awaited, and we're so glad for the both of you for making and taking the time today. So all that being said, we'll talk to you all in part two of chapter one of the
- 01:07:23
- Seventh -Day Adventism as we continue to look into LNG White and the evolvement of the