Last month’s Review features an article by Janel Tasker entitled, “A Heartfelt Plea to My Fellow Adventists.” The article is about the experiences of a Canadian woman who was a devout member of a different faith community but, after years of friendship with Tasker, had begun attending a Seventh-day Adventist Church.
“We met through a mutual friend who assumed that since we both spoke English with similar accents and seemed to be religious types, we must be basically the same. Carrie was a devout member of her religious group. I was a lifelong Adventist.
“During the next several months and years we, along with our husbands, began a long journey of deep discussions and study. As a result of our shared journey, Carrie and her husband both came to the conclusion that the religious group they had previously identified with was promoting some serious errors. They made the agonizing decision to leave, knowing it would be very hard for their family to accept. They left the supportive and dignified religious community they had loved for many years, exchanging it for our very small, rural Adventist church.”
Things were going swimmingly until the couples moved far away from each other. At their new location, Carrie and her husband searched for a Seventh-day Adventist Church that could be their new church home. As narrated by Tasker, Carrie and her husband attended several different churches but were repeatedly confronted with Adventist lunacy, of a conservative, liberal, or nondescript variety.
We will spend the rest of this article, and part 2, commenting on these alleged examples of Adventist craziness.
Stop with the Rock ‘n Roll in Church
The liberal lunacy was this one:
“Music so loud and lighting so dark that she felt she was back in the nightclubs she used to frequent before she joined her original religious group.”
Yes, that is a problem. Satan’s music doesn’t belong in God’s church, and most of us really do know the difference. We do. But if you don’t, please consult the description above: if it sounds like the music in a nightclub, it doesn’t belong in the church. If it sounds like a rock music radio station, it doesn’t belong in church.
Is There a Reason Why We Are Talking Politics?
The non-ideologically-specified lunacy was this:
“Sabbath School class in which the focus was entirely on politics—while both the Sabbath School quarterly and the Bible stayed firmly closed.”
Adventists have always believed that Jesus is coming very, very soon, hence we frequently talk, write, and argue about current events, often including current politics, and how these developments fit our eschatological scenarios. Nevertheless, the Bible should always be open during Sabbath School discussions of this nature. A discussion of politics completely free of connections to Scripture and the Spirit of Prophecy is inappropriate.
Salvation by Diet
Another even-handed criticism was this one:
“Discussions about food from both sides, with some Adventists advocating an organic whole plant food diet, and others telling her there was no reason not to eat pork and drink alcohol.”
I agree that conservatives and liberals can both go to extremes on the topic of diet. Some conservative Adventists seem to believe in salvation by diet, and some liberal Adventists are not as careful with their gospel freedom as the Apostle Paul warns us to be (1 Cor. 8).
That said, however, this anecdote does not ring true. I’ve been to several conservative Adventist churches—I’m a member of a very conservative church now—but I’ve never visited a congregation so conservative that they tried to badger me into becoming a vegan (I’m a lacto-ovo vegetarian, eating milk and egg products but not flesh foods, because I was raised that way).
Likewise, I’ve attended some very liberal Adventist churches, churches that serve coffee on the premises, but I’ve never been anywhere so liberal that they said we ought to drink alcohol and eat pork. There is diversity of opinion and practice on diet and foods in our denomination, but my experience is that, at least in an in-person setting such as a church, Adventists tend to be relatively quiet and non-evangelical about what they eat and drink.
Pastors, Don’t Stare People Down
“In a tiny congregation Carrie’s family attended for several weeks, a very pointed sermon about “people who sit on the fence,” while the speaker continued to glance directly at Carrie and her family at regular intervals.”
That does seem a bit tactless. Perhaps conferences are putting too much pressure on pastors to baptize new members.
The rest of Carrie’s (or Janel Tasker’s) bill of particulars is aimed at conservative Adventists.
I Wish We Could All Live in the Mountains, at High Altitude
“Impassioned appeals to sell everything and move to the mountains and live off the grid to avoid the upcoming Sunday laws.”
I am sympathetic to those who have had a belly-full of conservative Adventism. We conservative Adventists are a very difficult breed, often demanding a level of sanctification from others we have not achieved ourselves, and often enthused about new and strange interpretations of Scripture, especially those touching on core gospel issues, oddly enough.
I happen to agree with Carrie (and Janel Tasker) that we ought to be very careful on this topic. I’ve never been to an Adventist Church where the Pastor from the pulpit told people to sell everything and try to live off the grid at high altitude, but I’ve seen the results of a Sabbath School class that taught largely the same thing.
A case I’m familiar with involves an octogenarian husband and his septuagenarian wife who were convinced in their Sabbath School class that they needed to sell their home—located in a city of about 30,000—and move onto some rural land in a neighboring state. This seemed an ill-advised move given their age, frailty, and financial situation, especially considering that the mortgage on their home had long since been paid off. But their Sabbath School class had convicted them that they needed to move to the country, so they listed their home and it sold quickly.
Before the sale closed they discovered a funny fact: they didn’t own “their” home. It had belonged to the husband’s deceased former wife, who had several grown children from a previous marriage; those grown children now owned half of the house. But the elderly couple had already entered into a contract with a buyer to sell their home, and the deal, as it got closer to closing, took on a life of its own, as deals do—it is hard to get off a moving train. By the time the closing costs and expenses were paid, and the former wife’s kids got their half of the proceeds, there was not enough money for that couple to successfully re-locate to the rural land in the neighboring state. They learned a hard lesson.
I ran into that older couple just the other day. They now live in a rental unit designed for elderly folks—in the same city as before. They do not like the people who own and manage their unit, but their options are limited because they very inadvisedly sold their home. They attend a different Adventist church now, a more liberal one.
Silly Evolutionists
“Comments about how silly evolutionists are. Carrie’s husband currently believes in evolution, and would have appreciated a candid and respectful discussion of the topic.”
The real reason Carrie will never become an Adventist now begins to come into focus: her husband. He’s a medical doctor, and he’s a Darwinist.
Seventh-day Adventists are always going to be the most anti-Darwinist Christians, because Adventism’s main distinctive doctrine is the Sabbath, which is founded upon God creating the world in six literal days and resting on the seventh day. (Gen. 2:2-3; Ex. 20:11)
(By the way, would you choose a personal physician who believes that the amazing human body, vastly more intricate, complex and ingenious than any machine mankind has ever produced, did not have a Designer and is the result of random chance?)
Darwinism has a definite purpose, which is to explain how the creation came to be when it is assumed that there is no Creator God—because if there is a Creator God, He is a much better explanation for the creation than the un-directed processes hypothesized by Darwin and his successors. The point and the purpose of Darwinism is to allow one to be a rational and intellectually fulfilled atheist. In effect, the central purpose of Darwinism is infidelity and unbelief.
So are Darwinists “silly”? The term “silly” implies a lighthearted harmlessness, and Scripture is not that kind, calling Darwinists “fools”:
“The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no God.’” Psalm 14:1.
Darwinists are not harmless; they are a danger to everyone’s eternal salvation.
Moreover, Darwinism fails in its basic apologetical purpose—to give an atheistic explanation of the creation—because science has shown that you cannot get life from non-life. Everything we know about physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy points toward the hypothesis that life could never come into being from non-life.
If you need a Creator God to create life, to create the first living cell—and clearly we do, according to everything modern science can tell us—what is the point of the remainder of the theory of evolution? Why do we need evolution to change the living cell into a plant or animal and then eventually into a human being? The Creator God who is necessary to make the first living cell could also have created the basic types of plants and animals, and Adam and Eve, over the course of six days, just as Scripture teaches.
Our origins apologetics need not descend into ad hominem and name-calling; we should know how to engage in a serious discussion of the issues, or least be able to point someone to resources—typically books and websites—where the issues are argued by competent experts. (A good start is to read my book, Dinosaurs—An Adventist View, and have extra copies for sharing. :-))
In Part 2, we will discuss the complaints about the vaccine and mask mandates, which I think are the heart of the article, and the real reason it was written.