...on being Seventh-day Adventist

As a member of the Emergent growing, generative friendship, I am learning to appreciate fully the church in all its forms, which can be most difficult when it comes to Seventh-day Adventism, my home, because I know its faults. "But God gives more grace."

Last night I had an enlightening conversation with a fellow SDA who is quite close to me. It was yet another variation on a conversation I have had many times before. It generally goes something like this. The person I'm talking with quietly or jokingly expresses some discontent with Adventism, never harshly, mind you, but almost like one would speak of someone who might be within ear shot. It's the kind of criticism one could easily explain away if they had to. At some point, I'll commiserate by deconstructing the very thing that’s got them sore, and before I know it, I find my conversation partner defending the faith from me as if I meant it harm. It's uncanny how predictable it can be.

Knowing that despite my hopes and efforts to the contrary my recollections are apt to be rife with bias and woefully reductionistic, in recounting what happened last night I will only seek to recall my own offenses. My primary offense last night went something like this, "If the hope of God is to reconcile the whole world unto Godself, embracing the entire earth in God's resurrection (basically, what it means to be 'missional'), then I struggle to see how all our calculating of prophetic times and interpreting ourselves to be the (definite article) "remnant" spoken of throughout scripture and figured prominently in the imagery of Daniel and Revelations, who against all odds remain true to God, gets us there." Now, of course, I was hardly so eloquent or coherent. And, mind you, my deconstruction was in response to some things about the SDA dynamic my conversation partner (in jest) just didn't want to be bothered with anymore. Nonetheless, this statement changed the tide of our conversation. [Read More!] Perhaps it was too incisive.

No more sympathetic exchange. From that point on I was expected to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what it was I meant. I hate that. Adversarial (in the legal sense) conversations never accomplish much good. Nonetheless the same enculturation I was in the mist of deconstructing makes it very difficult to back down from a hermeneutical, apologetic challenge. So I pressed on. At some point I brought up how missionally problematic the SDA sense of identity is (Rev. 12:17), substantiated primarily upon some hyper-contextual shenanigans, misappropriating certain New Testament phrases like "the testimony of Jesus Christ" and "the spirit of prophesy" (undoubtedly my second offense).

It was then that something unexpected happened. My dialogue partner, who is a generation more mature than I, confessed that, although she considered such phrases very much indicative of the SDA church, she didn't see them as the exclusive expression thereof. This surprised me because she, consistent with most those of her generation who were raised in the SDA church and now hold the positions of power, is very pro-Adventist, and such an adjudication is not the party line. My conversation partner went on to rationalize that her position was the difference between being a literalist and taking a more reasoned approached. By way of example, she suggested that literalists have a hard time differentiating individuals from the institutions Adventists believe are indicted in eschatological prophecy.

For the first time in my life, I felt compassion for literalists. It became apparent to me that literalism was the only consistent way one could expect to interpret biblical prophecy. And how could one avoid literalism with all the emphasis put on prophetic time calculation and 'precise' reading of scripture distinctive to Adventist doctrine (Daniel's 2300 Days Prophecy, its postulates and corollaries)? Absent literalism, how could one expect for the millions of Adventists in the world to be 'reasoned' in the same way about the same things? Whereas some variation in interpretation is to be expected, free-spiritedness (an open interpretation of scripture) is not prized in a cultural homogeny (like Adventism) whose identity is predicated upon (biblical) accuracy and (doctrinal) distinctives: "I am, because you're not."

All of this again raises a question for me—that I expressed last night (possibly offense number 3)—that I have wrestled with for a few years now. At what point is it disingenuous for me to claim to be SDA when I have deconstructed/reconstructed or flat out disagree with much, if not most, of what is distinctively SDA? I truly want to honor the best intuitions of my denominational tradition, which birthed and nurtured my theological imagination for so many years, even though in integrity I must critique much of its teachings and practice. For years now I have always confessed up front when people start asking me what I believe—and what they really mean is what do Adventists believe—that I am not the best example of Adventist theology. At most, I now consider myself a "post-Remnant Seventh-day Adventist". I am totally through with believing that what sets me right with God at the same time makes everybody who is otherwise committed suspect.

Which brings me to a new nagging question. What are the effects of living out of this hermeneutical dualism that my dialogue partner describes as exemplary of the more reasoned approach to dogma—this striving to maintain distinction between individuals and their aggregate institutions that Adventists believe are indicted by scriptural prophecy? It's a continuation of the whole "God hates the sin but loves the sinner" motif. I believe his mantra has for too long blinded us to any possibility of joining God in the redemption of God's good world. The most we could ever hope to accomplish believing this is to save individuals out of world before it all crashes and burns.

Thus, as night follows day, so it follows that the SDA church as an institution as well as its individual members have been and remain largely complicit in some of the greatest injustices perpetrated in the earth. And why shouldn't that be the case? For as much as individual members may cultivate reasoned and nuanced beliefs for sanity sake, the institutional constructs are allowed to remain the same—in misbegotten honor of God who changes not—whether or not they accomplish anything for the good of God's creation.

God doesn't change (if we hear that as a statement God makes of himself) because God is inerrant. Such infallibility does not transfer to us or our constructs, systems or institutions just because we claim God. As creatures of a Creator God who is always creating and whose creations are always evolving, our expectation should be the need for continual re-formation, I would think. Thus, the reoccurring need to deconstruct in order to reconstruct based on what we understand more fully today than we did yesterday. What I continue to wonder is: Can I do this and in integrity to self and in fairness to the group still call myself Adventist?