Spectrum Voices

The Record is the official publication of the Adventist Church in Australasia. The March 7, 2015 issue featured an article titled "Understanding Ice Core Science," by Dr Sven Ostring, on pages 16 & 17. Further discussion of this article seems vital, because it relates to a proper understanding of Genesis and an accurate understanding of the aims of science, and hence, the relation between science and the Bible.

Our clarification brings critical facts about ice cores into focus. In Greenland and Antarctica great ice sheets are present and cores have been removed in sections, which collectively reach a depth of about 3 km. In the Greenland ice cores, annual layers can be counted back to 90,000 years before the present (BP) and there is yet more ice below.¹ The isotopic composition of the ice and studies of the trapped gases have yielded much information regarding past climate. Since the ice core record extends back in time to beyond Creation Week (about 6,000 years BP), it is commendable to assess ice core findings critically as done in the Record. Others have done this before and the authors of this clarification do so in support of both science and the Bible. However, our overall conclusions differ from those of the Record. We hope these clarifying comments will be taken as constructive so that the discussion is elevated beyond argument, and that it does reveal harmony between science and the Bible. We are encouraged by a quotation from Patriarchs and Prophets:

Science opens new wonders to our view; she soars high, and explores new depths; but she brings nothing from her research that conflicts with divine revelation. Ignorance may seek to support false views of God by appeals to science, but the book of nature and the written word shed light upon each other (p. 115)."

Before critical counting of ice core layers began, sound evidence indicated that each layer almost invariably represented one year.² The accuracy of the counting of layers has been confirmed by the layer specific occurrence of volcanic ash from dated eruptions, by geochemistry, and by sudden climate changes independently dated by other methods and also dated by the ice core layers. All these methods contributed to confirmation of counting before 2,000 BP, which was extended back to 74,000 years BP at the Toba eruption. The Greenland ice cores indicate that an ice age terminated about 11,700 years BP but the Antarctic ice cores and the ocean sediment layers, which date further back in time, indicate the occurrence of recurring ice ages.³

Because the age of the Earth revealed by ice core layers appears to be inconsistent with some theological opinions, for example, the young earth creationist (YEC) belief that the planet originated 6,000 years BP at Creation Week, attempts appear to be made to discredit ice core science. It appears that YEC have resorted to inaccurate reporting and misquotation of science articles in an attempt to support their views. Their approach is illustrated below with reference to the published Record article.

Based on misquotation, the Record states, for example, that scientists assumed each ice core layer represented one year, that Richard Alley states we could all be fooled today by the ice core data, that laser light scattering creates serious errors in layer counting, that layer counting has not been verified beyond 2,000 years BP, and that "scientific conclusions are based on unverifiable assumptions, reductionist models and equivocal data." The above have no valid basis and are the product of out-of-context statements, misquotation and biased views. The following quotation from the Record serves as an example:

Richard Alley has noted 'Agreement [between these parameters] does not prove accuracy, however; perhaps all of us were being fooled in the same way.' Alley, R. The Two-Mile Time Machine, p. 57. He is referring to the reality that we could all be fooled by scientific assumptions and models being used to interpret the data."

Alley was not providing comment for us today as implied by the Record. He was referring to a time early in their research (ca 1990) when they were uncertain of the accuracy of the layer counts. The next sentence (omitted by the Record) in his book reads: "To check for this possibility, we needed to look for other help." They did—and they found it—independently dated climate changes, and historically dated volcanic eruptions, to serve as reference points for comparison with their own data. The agreement was excellent. They were not being fooled. Richard Alley's words have been taken out of context to create doubt in the minds of Record readers. Why?

We could go on in this vein, but that only becomes tedious. It is more meaningful to assess what ice core science really tells us, especially in relation to Creation. It is relevant to note that all the science references except one quoted in the original Record article are pre-2000 vintage. The discussions are mainly of the early Greenland ice core GISP2—"one ice core illustrates the process", the author says—and the Record appears to be quite critical of this pioneering work. However, six major ice cores have now been drilled in Greenland, nine in Antarctica and four in Canada, nearly all made independently and all critically assessed. A total of nineteen ice cores drilled, and the results all correlate and are in close agreement with the pioneering work described by Richard Alley.

When one considers the entire picture more fully and more carefully, as hinted at above, a view emerges concerning ice cores that differs quite markedly from that published in the Record. The emergent view, we suggest, is one of great achievement, meticulous science and innovative ideas regarding the planet Earth. The results may not agree with some theological views, but they are an honest attempt to arrive at accurate information concerning our environment. Similar accuracy by theologians would be welcome, but often appears lacking in statements on science by YEC. A firm belief in theology does not give licence to misquote science in order to support belief. Nor does it give the right to promote, in a scriptural setting, ideas that are essentially speculative and lack a biblical basis. The post-flood ice age is an example.

The Record article initially asks an important question:

But does the history [of the earth's climate as revealed by ice cores] they are finding disprove the biblical account of earth's history?"

This question was not addressed directly and consequently not answered, so perhaps we can venture an answer, which is: No! In fact, ice core studies and other science support the Bible as we discuss below, and this science also assists in defining creation theology.

There is a problem in the interpretation of Genesis 1:1-3. Is Genesis 1:1-2 part of Creation Week? This question appears to have perplexed theologians for centuries and no resolution seems to be in sight. Although several lines of Scriptural evidence, discussed clearly by Davidson,⁴ indicate that Genesis 1:1-2 occurred before Creation Week of Genesis 1:3-2:4, an unequivocal resolution has not been achieved.⁴

That suggests it is time to consult God's other (second) book, the book of Nature. When this is done, a clear resolution appears and the harmony of science with the Bible is confirmed. Thus studies of ocean floor sediments, the dating of rocks by modern methods, and now the ice core record, establish that the planet Earth was created "in the beginning" (Genesis 1:1), long before Creation Week of Genesis 1 dated by genealogies at 6,000 years BP (Genesis 5 and 11).

The above diverse studies also provide support for the biblical interpretations of Davidson [] that suggest a temporal separation of verses 1-2 and verse 3 of Genesis 1 (the "Gap" proposal). Davidson notes that Scripture gives no indication how long the "Gap" period was between creation of the universe and Creation Week, of Genesis 1. He suggests "millions or billions of years" which would accord with science. Davidson places Genesis 1 in a broader perspective when he said⁴:

Furthermore, if the passive gap interpretation is correct (as I have argued above), then the creation of 'the heavens and the earth' during the span of time termed 'in the beginning,' encompassed the whole galactic universe, including the planet Earth in its 'unformed and unfilled' condition (Gen 1:2)."

Returning to the question above that we set out to answer, clearly the ice core science does not disprove any biblical history. The science is in accord with the Gap concept and the occurrence of Creation Week on an "old" Earth. The ice core science is also in accord with the Bible regarding Creation Week as a recent event. Based on biblical chronologies (Genesis 5 and 11), this occurred 6-7,000 years BP. Ice core studies indicate that the last glacial period (Ice Age, glacial maximum about 23,000 years BP) ended 11,700 years BP and the low and very variable temperatures of the glaciation would not be compatible with life in Eden prior to the Fall when temperatures were "mild and uniform" (Patriarchs & Prophets, p. 61). The last 1,300 years of the Ice Age (termed the Younger Dryas) have been further characterised by the ice core studies. For over a millenium, the earth was locked in cold, dry and windy conditions that greatly affected climate and plant growth throughout the Northern Hemisphere.⁵ However, after the end of the Ice Age and at the beginning of the Holocene, temperatures gradually increased, stabilised about 10,000 years BP and remained remarkably constant thereafter. Based on ice core studies, it is reasonable to propose that Creation Week occurred after 10,000 years BP.

Thus ice core studies have given insight concerning the time when Creation Week occurred on an "old" earth and the climate on the planet in relation to Creation Week. Creation theology has been clarified by ice core science, which is in accord with Scripture.

References:

K.K. Andersen and 49 colleagues, Nature, v. 431, pp. 147-151 (2004). See also: A. Svensson and 7 coworkers, Journal of Geophysical Research(Atmospheres) v. 110, D2 (2005).
R.B. Alley and 11 colleagues, Journal of Geophysical Research, v. 102, pp. 26,367-26,381 (1997).
L. Augustin and 55 colleagues, Nature, v. 429, pp. 623-628 (2004).
R.M. Davidson, "Understanding the 'When' of Creation in Genesis 1-2", in Bryan W. Ball, (Ed.), In the Beginning, Science and Scripture Confirm Creation, Pacific Press Publishing Association, Nampa, Idaho, U.S.A., 2012, Ch. 7, pp. 97-113.
R.B. Alley and P.U. Clark, Annu. Review Earth and Planetary Science, v. 27, pp. 149-182 (1999).

D. Stuart. Letham was awarded a PhD (Birmingham, UK) in organic chemistry in 1955. His subsequent research work included the purification, determination of structure and synthesis of the first naturally occurring cytokinin, compounds that induce cell division in plants. They occur in plants at the level of 1 part per billion (see Letham, Annual Review of Plant Physiology 1967, 1983). He is the author of over 190 refereed papers in biochemistry and plant physiology journals. He retired from the Australian National University 1992 as Professor Emeritus.

Col J. Gibson worked in accounting in industry for a decade before taking an academic position as a senior lecturer in accounting at universities in Australia, New Zealand, and the University of South Pacific (Suva, Fiji). As a natural naturalist from an early age he has been active, as a hobby interest, in helping many professional scientists in fieldwork, and now in retirement still acts as a citizen scientist, which includes field observations and bird photography.

Both authors have discussed the Science/Creation subject for the past few years and thought it was time (obviously after reading a particular Record issue as noted in this article) to put some of their thoughts on this interface into the public arena for others to consider and comment.

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We really want to believe ourselves to be good people at the core. We want to believe that the values enshrined in our constitution, espoused in our religious tradition, and proclaimed on our institutional brochures.

This is the sixth post in a ten-part series for Spectrum’s 2015 Summer Reading Group. Each post will be drawn from chapters of the book Unclean by Richard Beck. You can view the tentative reading/posting schedule here.

In Chapter 7 of Unclean, Beck explores the emotion of contempt as a boundary psychology, a cousin of disgust. Beck writes, “[W]hile sociomoral disgust may be a relatively rare experience for many of us, the emotions of disdain, superiority, and contempt are fairly common. Who can avoid feeling smug around certain sorts of people?” (p. 107) Beck explains that disgust and contempt are intimately related, pointing to results from psychological studies to show that the feeling of superiority is dehumanizing and destabilizing to intimate relationships.

In this post, I wish to underscore Beck’s emphasis on the ways contempt and disgust affect the way we treat each other by disagreeing with his concession that extreme forms of it are “relatively rare.” We really want to believe ourselves to be good people at the core. We want to believe that the values enshrined in our constitution, espoused in our religious tradition, and proclaimed on our institutional brochures. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And these values, simultaneously religious and political, elevate us above the Nazis, the Stalinists, and in more modern times, pro-slavery secessionists and the KKK. We want to believe that if we teach our children to “love their neighbors”, if we teach them about slavery and the Civil Rights Movement and the Holocaust then the atrocities of history will never be repeated. Our philosophical beliefs, we believe, inoculate us from bigotry and the capacity to dehumanize and brutalize.

But this notion, at once a psychological and political theory, could not be further from the truth. Societal atrocities continue to plague us in the face of universally accepted values like compassion and fairness. If there is a universal within the moral conscience of human beings, it is that we find the moral flexibility to excuse our own impulses toward extreme sociomoral disgust which fuels our own racism, bigotry, and dehumanization of others. The milieu of casual anti-semitism from which the Holocaust was born is not that foreign to Americans, despite the outrage to our amour-propre. We can interpret the native American genocide (whenever we aren’t ignoring it completely), the institution of slavery, and the subsequent oppression of African-Americans as historical failures our society has overcome. Our real lineage, we imagine, runs not through the oppressors and murderers, but through the liberators, freedom fighters, and civil rights activists who brought about change. We celebrate MLK over Bull Connor precisely because we have fantasies of ourselves in the march instead of behind the firehose. However, if we look at the facts, we contemporary Americans, Seventh-day Adventists, Christians, are subject to exactly the same tragic irony humans have always have been susceptible to—we imagine ourselves as angels, but act otherwise.

The U.S. government has regularly subjected Abu Zubaydah to sexual humiliation, temperature extremes, beatings, isolation, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and several other forms of torture over the course of several years. In a single month in 2002, Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. He was stuffed into a confined box and then insects were placed in the box. His torture included the removal of his left eye. He had a previous injury suffered while he was fighting communists in Afghanistan which was exploited and exacerbated by his torture at the hands of the United States. His mistreatment has left him with permanent brain damage. He suffers from blinding headaches, an excruciating sensitivity to sounds (his torture included “music played at debilitating volumes"), and seizures, over 200 in the course of two years. The United States has tortured him literally to the point of insanity. He can no longer recall his father’s name. Abu Zubaydah has been held in U.S. custody without being charged with a crime since March 2002.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was similarly brutally tortured. The United States imprisoned his sons, 6 and 8 years old, and used them first to locate him and then as leverage against him. The children were denied food and water and were mentally tortured by having ants and other creatures put on their legs to scare them.

These are hardly isolated cases. U.S. prisoners in the War on Terror were forced to stand on broken legs and were regularly and repeatedly raped. “Prisoners were subjected to ‘rectal feeding’ without medical necessity. Rectal exams were conducted with ‘excessive force.’ The report highlights one prisoner later diagnosed with anal fissures, chronic hemorrhoids and ‘symptomatic rectal prolapse.’” The United States has tortured approximately 100 people to death in its war on terror. Among them are Mani al-Utaybi, Yasser al-Zahrani who was only 16 when he was imprisoned, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed. They died while suffering a torture technique called dry-boarding. Dry rags were shoved so far down their throats that medical examiners could not pull them out of their corpses.

Prisoners who have been cleared for release, in some cases multiple times, are being force-fed in increasingly brutal ways. A nurse friend of mine once described nasogastric intubation as the most painful medical procedure we perform on conscious patients without anesthetic. One report describes the same “large tube” being used on multiple prisoners. Keep in mind that these are prisoners who have never been accused of a crime, some of whom have in fact been cleared of any wrongdoing and cleared for release. “Techniques include making cells ‘freezing cold’ to accentuate the discomfort of those on hunger strike and the introduction of ‘metal-tipped’ feeding tubes, which Aamer said were forced into inmates' stomachs twice a day and caused detainees to vomit over themselves.”

One might argue that this behavior is limited to that of a few people, but it turns out that a majority of Americans are supportive of torture. In fact, Christians are more supportive of torture than non-religious Americans. However, polling shows that the American public still opposes torture.

Willingness to dehumanization does not come out of nowhere. Widespread anti semitism festered in Nazi Germany. Widespread anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia festers in the United States. Cable news channels and political commentary are saturated with claims about the Muslim world oppressing women, that female genital mutilation is an Islamic problem, that violence in the name of Islam is not condemned by moderate Muslims—claims which are demonstrably false. One need only go to the comments section of a news article about Muslims to read Americans describing Muslims as “unevolved,” “animals,” and worse.

I have chosen to highlight American Islamophobia, but I could have discussed the racism and nationalism behind much of the unethical human experimentation and other human rights violations of the United States. Or I could have discussed the widespread homophobia particularly acute among fervent Christians that continues to fuel abuse¹ and abandonment² of LGBT children and discrimination against LGBT adults.³

Parenthetically, I do not mean to say—nor do I believe—that anyone who raises moral, theological, or political objections to e.g. gay marriage is a bigot or is somehow just as debased as the perpetrators of atrocities like the My Lai Massacre and the Holocaust. Political issues like gay marriage are issues about which reasonable people can disagree without necessarily being motivated by prejudice or animus. Rather, my intention is to assert that the widespread (though rapidly evaporating) contempt and disgust for LGBT Americans creates an environment in which the physical and emotional abuse of LGBT children and the conscious and deliberate oppression of LGBT adults can thrive. Examples of the kind of deliberate oppression I am thinking of include baseless accusations of pedophilia, denial of housing, termination of employment in positions unrelated to one’s human sexuality (the firing of a gay mail carrier, say), sexual blackmail, intimidation, physical assault including sexual assault and rape, discrimination or abuse by law enforcement, et cetera.

Beck writes, “My fear is, given the strength of the disgust response, that people will conclude that sociomoral disgust is symptomatic only of very extreme behavior, the purview of racists and bigots. But as I tried to show toward the end of the last chapter (and hope to show in this one), the dynamics of disgust are everyday affairs” (p. 107). Beck’s flattering assumption that his audience is of course incomparable with Nazi Germany and that we, his readers, are not bigots and racists is spectacularly false. Bigotry and racism are ubiquitous. The same kind of prejudice, in quantity and in quality, from which the Holocaust was born exists in the United States, in the global Seventh-day Adventist church, and within every human society. Beck’s claim that “the dynamics of disgust are everyday affairs” could not be more true.

We profoundly misunderstand the relationship people have with their doctrines, values, and ideologies when we fail to recognize our unbounded capacity to reinterpret, to admit exception, and to flatly ignore our most sacred principles in order to accommodate our contempt and sociomoral disgust. Religious liberty, the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment,⁴ the right to a speedy trial⁵, or freedom of belief [16] can be switched off like a light switch whenever we deem it convenient. The notion that our past atrocities are water under the bridge is absurd. The participants in the My Lai Massacre are still alive, as are the people on either side of the firehoses of the Civil Rights Movement and the participants in the Rwandan genocide.⁷ They’re not even that old. And our contemporary political dialog could not be more contemptuous. Liberalism is a “mental disorder,” while conservatives are “unintelligent ignorant racists.”

Beck directs our attention to the Lord’s Supper, as an antidote for the human propensity for disgust and contempt. Yet, we would be mistaken if we conclude that a correct theological understanding of the Lord’s Supper will enable us to overcome our racism and classism. Rather than correcting mistaken theological beliefs, a more effective remedy to disgust and contempt is to transgress the boundaries between ourselves and the other, as Beck explains:

Psychologically, we observe in all this how the practice of the Lord’s Supper expands the moral circle. By universalizing kinship language the Lord’s Supper is actively pushing against the sociomoral fissures of disgust and contempt. The Lord’s Supper, through its metaphors and the missional practices it promotes, is a ritual that is fundamentally altering and remaking the psyche. (p. 113)

In other words, Beck is not saying that incorrect beliefs are responsible for the sociomoral disgust and contempt at the center of Matthew 9 and of 1 Corinthians and that an intellectual correction of these beliefs would resolve the contempt and disgust. Rather, Beck points to Jesus’ practice of transgressing sociomoral boundaries in Matthew 9 and the practice of the egalitarian ritual of the Lord’s Supper—it is a moral act—that dismantles sociomoral barriers.

But communion is about more than just gathering around the communion table quarterly during a worship service. This notion of communion with difference is a practice that is applied inconsistently within the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I reflect with pride on our ability to enjoy services with locals and internationals, the rich and poor, the highly educated and those without education, and the young and old. All of these groups participate alongside one another in our church communities. On the other hand, I can’t wait for the Seventh-day Adventist Church to invite LGBT voices to their next discussion of human sexuality. And often certain ideological perspectives are intentionally excluded from our conversations, and those who hold them are marginalized in our congregations. We sometimes exclude perspectives from those scientists among us, certain interpretations of scripture (think the IJ, origins, human sexuality, etc.), and political perspectives from the far left, to cite a few examples I have experienced. Perhaps we should remain hopeful in progress so long as we continue to practice communion and organize potlucks.

______________________

Some LGBT youth are sent to conversion camps at which they endure physical and psychological torture and sexual humiliation: “[T]hey would attach electrodes to your genitals (usually one to the shaft of the penis and one to the scrotum) and show you porn, both gay and straight. If you got aroused while watching the straight porn, nothing happened, but if you got aroused while looking at gay porn, they would administer an electric shock to your groin.” (See the Reddit AMA, "I am a guy who was sent to an ex-gay camp in Iowa."
See "6 Shocking Realities of the 'Troubled Teen' Industry."
Spectrum has covered Andrews University’s unwillingness to support homeless LGBT youth here and here.
In Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States, Rebecca Gordon quotes John Conroy: “[O]ne of the central aspects of torture, that the class of people whom society accepts as torturable has a tendency to expand.” She writes, “That class has in fact expanded to include Muslim men living in the United States, including U.S. Citizens.” She argues that there is “already a larger group of U.S. citizens whom society accepts as torturable: prisoners in state and federal jails” (p. 57).
Including U.S. citizens José Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi.
In his book The End of Faith new atheist Sam Harris writes, “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them” (p. 52). Bizarrely, Harris defends himself against critics of this statement by saying, “[N]owhere in my work do I suggest that we kill harmless people for thought crimes.” See "On the Mechanics of Defamation."
Ronald Osborn explores Adventist participation in the Rwandan genocide in "No Sanctuary in Mugonero: Notes on Rwanda, Revival, and Reform."

Robert Jacobson is assistant professor of mathematics at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island. He teaches a senior seminar on science and religion and would never let his students use Wikipedia as a source in their research papers.

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I sat in my black pencil skirt, pink lace blouse, blue-black suit jacket, and let the tears run down my face unchecked. I could hear behind me the cheers and “amens” and “hallelujahs” from the nice Caribbean family we had met earlier that day and with whom we had swapped stories and slices of pizza just a couple hours before. I had considered trying to hold onto my composure or maintain some type of professional façade when the music started playing and the voting lines started forming and the obvious result hung as-yet-unnamed but potent in the air. But I couldn’t. I had long ago learned that my eyes tend to leak despite my best efforts when they had a mind to. And besides, I was tired. It had been a long day of impassioned speeches, a day filled with perspectives and testimonies about female pastors (although none, from my recollection, from any female pastors), and I had lost the desire to pretend that it didn’t matter.

It's a dangerous thing to care about this result if you are female working for the church. It can be evidence of your rebellious spirit, your pride, your desire for man’s affirmation instead of God’s. This shouldn’t matter, you are told, if you really believe your calling comes from God alone. You need to just keep your chin up, keep on doing what you’ve always done. But I was tired. And I couldn’t quite understand, if ordination is fundamentally the human recognition of who the Holy Spirit has already called and equipped, how a world of people who had never met me could say without a shadow of a doubt that my gender makes my calling impossible. And so as the results were read out and the people around me cheered I sat a little taller, tilted my tear-stained face a little higher. You might not have heard my story before, I thought, but please, even as you celebrate, see me now.

It’s been two months since the assembled delegates of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists voted against divisions having the authority to decide whether or not to ordain women to the gospel ministry. In some ways, it’s been a time of confusion. Some have taken this to mean that currently serving female pastors should step down, or even that female elders should be asked to resign. Unions and divisions worldwide have had to write clarifying statements to their constituents explaining that this vote merely affirms current policy, and that no policies were actually changed. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been asked by church members “what does this mean? Can you explain this to me? So what happens now?”

In other ways, however, these months have been a time of clarity. For all the talk of the “sweet spirit” permeating the General Conference meetings, for me and many others who were there or followed the proceedings from afar, this Session served to highlight the deep issues that divide us in the Adventist Church. We are divided on the issue of women’s ordination, yes, but we are also divided on our hermeneutics, evangelism, eschatology, and even our mission. Is the Adventist church primarily called to be a holy example of obedience? Are we primarily called to be ushers for Christ’s return through our evangelistic efforts? Or are we primarily called to be faithful witnesses to the coming Kingdom of God through lives of grace and commitment to justice and opposition to the forces of Babylon?

In the aftermath of San Antonio, these differences seem to culminate in perhaps the most pressing divide in the Adventist church at the moment: our differing understanding of where power lies. As has been mentioned before in numerous articles, the Adventist church has had a unique organizational structure for over a hundred years now, set in place to help mitigate against “kingly power” being amassed by those at the top. In our current structure, there is a natural gap and potential tension between the division and union level, with the unions fundamentally accountable to their constituents (in terms of money and votes), and the division accountable to the GC (in terms of money and appointments), which is in turn accountable to the assembled delegates of the world church. What was evident at the General Conference is that the Global South, which has predominantly (although not universally) adopted a form of Adventism that is anti-intellectual and fundamentalist, has now risen to power. It is deeply ironic that for many of us third– or fourth-generation Adventists in the global north, the Adventism that we find so suffocating now is the indigenized version of the very Adventism our ancestors exported decades ago.

With this shift in demographics, many of the areas in Adventism that used to have power now find themselves without it, and thus the question is asked: what should those who find themselves on the progressive side of an increasingly conservative and fundamentalist denomination do? Should we allow the will of the majority to dictate on matters of conscience? Why should we stay connected to a church we no longer feel represents us? I have heard these questions and others like them from numerous young adult friends and church members over the past few months. In the last two weeks alone, I have had two separate conversations with individuals who shared with me that while they still felt committed to their local churches, they want nothing to do with the global structure post San Antonio. In conversations in homes, offices, hallways, I hear murmurings that the only way forward is a split. That we must continue on our path, and let the divide widen as it will.

I can see the power and potential in this direction. In many ways (aside from the potential logistical nightmare), it would be easier for our health and sanity to be with like-minded people, people with whom you can build synergy and momentum and a sustainable alternative vision of Adventism without energy being diverted into infighting and impassable divides. In many ways it makes sense that our focus should be on our local contexts, for that is where the deepest forms of community can be built.

Yet I am resistant to this solution as well. I love being part of a global church, and have deep roots in the global south. I believe that a largely overlooked dynamic at play in San Antonio was not just the current cultural differences between the global north and south, but the post-colonial push-back from a part of the world tired of being patronized, now flexing its muscles. In some ways, the motion on the table was an attempt to sidestep this power struggle by asking for the freedom to decide this issue regionally. But the patronizing relationship between north and south could still be seen in comments on the floor, where well-intentioned individuals would remind the global south that we once allowed them to have polygamy, when we first brought Adventism to them, and appeal for them to return the favor of allowing for cultural variances (leaving unsaid that they should learn from our example); and in post-decision analysis that painted entire continents as backwards, uneducated, and easily manipulated.

This dynamic is not unique to the Adventist church. I have a friend whose job takes her in and out of UN meetings and discussions, and she sees a similar pattern in their debates on issues like gender equality and individual rights and freedom of conscience. The global north passionately crusades for these issues – the global south resists the implied sense of superiority. In the resulting impasse it can feel pointless to try and continue the conversation.

So what should a progressive Adventist, passionate about living in light of the coming Kingdom do? If we care deeply about issues of justice, equality, liberation, transformation, and building Kingdom-oriented communities, where should we go from here?

On the one hand, I believe that the stance that many conferences and unions are taking is the right one. They are saying that while they love being part of a global church, and while they take the church’s collective decisions seriously, on matters of conscience they must follow where they see the Holy Spirit leading. Power that is not used is lost, and in these matters the unions are using the power given to them by their constituents.

On the other hand, however, I fear that within our unions and conferences are many liberals and progressives who want to write off our connection to a world church as unnecessary at best and contaminating at worst. But I believe doing so would be a mistake, and that we would be turning our backs on an incredible opportunity. If we as progressives claim to care about the world as it is, and to work towards the transformation of communities as an example of the world as it could be (and will be in the Kingdom to come), then isolating ourselves in like-minded groups will be a betrayal of that mission.

The world is facing global challenges. Challenges of unsustainable lifestyles and environmental degradation and growing inequality and cultural polarization. We see the implications of isolating ourselves in affinity groups in the gerrymandered political landscape of United States. Liberal areas get more liberal, conservative areas more conservative, and never the twain shall meet. But the issues facing us are too great for just one group to tackle. We will not solve them if we do not find ways to work across barriers of culture and geography and ideology and even history, colonial or otherwise.

Adventists are uniquely poised to be a witness to what a diverse group of people focusing on mission could look like. Of the 238 countries and areas of the world recognized by the United Nations, Adventism has a presence in 216. We have built systems of education and healthcare that have met real, this-world needs (and although I am aware of the way education has been a colonizing tool, it has also been a vehicle for liberation – see the story of the Stahls in Peru). Despite the deep divides between us, we are intimately connected. We share a common, recent history. We share practices that uniquely identify us. We share a commitment to the Sabbath that helps define our past, present, and future. In an age where information is everything, we share contact details – I have countless stories of traveling overseas, needing help, and finding the phone number and address of a local Adventist church that opened its doors and arms wide.

Yes, there is a lot that divides the Adventist Church. But there is also a lot that could potentially hold us together. Our increasingly polarized and divided world is facing challenges that increasingly necessitate that we work together. Belonging to a global Adventism despite its challenges can force us to have the kind of open, authentic, reciprocal, bridge-building conversations that the world so desperately needs.

This article was written by a female pastor in the Seventh-day Adventist Church who asked that her name be withheld.

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How much abuse should I take, and for how long will the church batter me for being a woman called by God to serve him? Perhaps I should leave all together. This is what I think as tonight, two months on, I try to find healing for my soul.

This week, women who serve as Seventh-day Adventist ministers have begun cautiously speaking out. First we received this article from one woman pastor, prompting the article below. In both cases, the women who submitted their articles to Spectrum asked not to be identified by name. In general, it is our policy to be as transparent as possible about authorship. However, we do consider and grant anonymity in cases when personal or professional reprisal is a concern. We have granted these two authors anonymity to speak freely about their experiences as women ministers in the Adventist denomination. -Ed.

Two months ago I sat in the Alamodome in San Antonio and listened in sadness. My heart was carved up and my soul battered as I listed to misogynistic speech after misogynistic speech from men with clear disdain for women. I couldn’t avoid the feeling that I belong to a church that finds such derogatory speech acceptable. I couldn’t help but think that, had I interchanged gender with race in the discussion, all hell would literally have broken loose.

In disbelief I listened to the business session chairman reflecting that the discourse had been respectful! My soul shouted out, How is it respectful to be called the devil or associated with the occult? How can you not see that this is disrespectful?

It felt like waves of abuse rolling over those of us who serve as female clergy in the Adventist Church.

As the people around me in the Alamodome cheered and clapped, and I wanted to shout to them "How can you be so un-Christian?” But like an abused woman I remained silent, and as a pastor, I comforted those who were distressed.

My soul was numb as I cried out to God, Where do You want me when my church doesn’t? When the theologians are clearly gender inclusive, yet men who seemingly can’t stand women are given free range to unleash hateful words and false theology with the full support of the highest leadership in my church?

The message I’m hearing is that as women, we should simply stop making a fuss. We should be grateful that we were allowed to be present. Really, we should be outside the sanctuary, while men of no qualifications can stand at the pulpit and distort the image of God.

During these past two months it has been difficult to focus on what’s next. I must keep up a good professional face, because I cannot express anger or disagreement. I cannot publicly say that my church is wrong, because if I do, then I’ll be labelled as angry woman who is only out to be like a man, and who wants to split the church for selfish reasons. I must not let my emotions show, as I fear that my job is in jeopardy, while the gates of verbal abuse toward women pastors have now been opened and seen as acceptable. After all, the General Conference has spoken.

Surely I must respect that the majority is right, that my voice doesn’t matter, that it would be best if I simply sat down and shut up, that I must be mistaken if I think God can call a woman. If I want to continue working in the Church then I must remain silent on the issue of injustice, and I should be understanding of people who don’t want female pastors, I shouldn’t be pushing my own agenda.

And in this same church I have met men who calculate their ordination track. I hear of non-theologically trained men who are given ordination credentials for being in leadership positions in the church hierarchy, and I am to understand that this is acceptable. I should humble myself and not ask for the recognition that ordination represents.

We have been discussing ordination for what seems like an eternity. This discussion is not new. What is new is the violently vitriolic speeches that have increased in number, and the contemptuousness being passed around the world as “regular acceptable Adventist church belief” through the church’s media platforms.

As a Protestant church, we claim to uphold the priesthood of all believers, and we say that in Christ there is no Jew nor Greek, no male nor female. But in the Adventist Church the distinctions are as clear as they are limiting.

So is the Adventist church organization truly God’s church today? We are clearly a priesthood of some believers, not all.

Yes I’m hurt and yes I’m disillusioned with my church. Yes I believe my church is not following God.

Listening to men who detest women so much that they cannot accept them as equals, I ask myself: if you hate what God has created in his image, then do you not hate God? Is this the way the church wants to go?

According to San Antonio General Conference Session, it is, and that is frightening!

“And God created man in his image – in his image he created them – male and female.”

I feel exhausted. Should I stay or should I go? This is my question to God. The World Church made it clear in San Antonio that it would be best if I, as a female (pastor), was invisible. If I fulfilled my “so misunderstood” calling behind the scenes, unseen and preferably unheard.

This article was written by a a Seventh-day Adventist minister who asked that her name not be used in the publication of this article.

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Chair of Andrews' communication department, Rachel Williams-Smith, talks about growing up off the grid, and why she remains an Adventist today.

Chair of Andrews University's communication department, Rachel Williams-Smith, talks about growing up off the grid, and why she remains an Adventist today.

Question: What inspired you to write your new book, Born Yesterday: The True Story of a Girl Born in the 20th Century but Raised in the 19th?

Answer: I’ve always known that I had an unusual life. Right about the time that I was 30, I thought about writing Oprah and telling her about my stories. I knew I had an unusual enough story to be on Oprah, and that was my dream. But then I thought, Well, that would give me my 15 minutes in the sunshine, as it were, and that’s it. Then what? I couldn’t answer why I would do that. So then decided I would never publicly share my story until I could answer “Why?”

It was not until I went to work on my doctoral program that I learned about ethnography and then autoethnography. Ethnographers look at people in their own natural settings; for instance, my professor had spent time in Tanzania studying Maasai warriors. Autoethnography is similar, but focuses on the study of self set in culture. That’s when I realized my unusual life could be a part of my study.

When I mentioned my background to my professor, he said: “You have got to use that!” I began to realize I really had a story to tell. My dissertation chair and others really pushed me to use it.

So I used auto-ethnography in my dissertation, which I finished in 2007, and I was the only one at Regent University to ever do a dissertation based on that method.

After that, everyone said: “You need to write a book!”

How long did it take you to write it? How did you find the process? Have you ever written a book before?

The electronic version of my book came out last summer, and the printed version was published in October last year.

After I finished my dissertation eight years ago, I was done with my story. I didn’t want to hear about it anymore! But probably three years later I went back to it, and started thinking about pulling different stories out of the dissertation.

It took me two years of serious writing to finish the book. It began with my dissertation, but that was scholarly research that used stories to enliven key points. The book is all a story, told without much commentary.

And no, I have never written a book before.

But yes, I will write another book. For every story I told in Born Yesterday, there are at least four others I didn’t tell. And I didn’t say much about my children and my challenge of raising them (in light of the way I was raised!). I also want to also tell more about my parents’ stories, and what made them the way they were.

But don’t expect the second book any time soon!

Who published Born Yesterday?

Xulon Press, which is actually a company that helps you to self-publish. I have had offers from publishers, but I am waiting for the right one. I decided to go with self-publishing initially. The book has a frankness that we don’t typically see in Adventist literature. I wanted it to be exactly what it is.

I have heard that it has had a powerful effect on people — that’s because it hasn’t been glossed over, and made pretty. It looks like life, and that is what people want.

I have prayed about this. The Lord really guided me on what he wanted me to do. He told me to tell the story of my life as I lived it.

Who inspired you?

There were two inspirations for my writing style. The first is Maya Angelou. I have read all of her books. She doesn’t dress anything up when she talks about her life. She makes it poetic, and paints pictures for her readers, but she doesn’t explain away her mistakes.

My other inspiration was the Bible, where I found the same thing. The Bible just tells the story. The prophet was told to go home without stopping. He stopped, and he died. That’s it. No editorializing. You just have to figure it out.

So I tell my story. What you get out of it is up to you. I share insights as they occur to me, but I am not going to go back and edit. You can think whatever you want to think when you finish.

It must have been hard to always be frank. Was there anything you left out in order to spare the feelings of your family? Was it difficult to be honest and open about your family and the way you grew up?

It was quite hard. I didn’t want to make anyone look bad. When I was writing some parts of the book, I cried a lot. But I finally decided I had to just tell what happened in my life. I am not condemning anyone else.

What about your mother and brothers?

After I wrote the manuscript, I sent it to my brothers and mother. My mother said she didn’t want to read it before it was published. My brothers read it, and they gave me input. For the most part they were really supportive.

Your book talks about your childhood spent growing up in the woods with no modern conveniences. Why did your parents decide to live this way?

Neither of my parents were raised Seventh-day Adventist. They were both born to relatively poor, large families, in the city. My mother came to the truth when she about 15, and father was about 20. For them, learning about the truth was amazing.

When my father was in the military, and when I was two years old, we went to Spain. My parents couldn’t understand the [Adventist church] services because they were in Spanish. So my parents started spending a lot of time reading Ellen G. White for themselves. This was in late 1960s and early 1970s. [Robert] Brinsmead and [Desomond] Ford were stirring up questions about the church. My parents were open-minded, questioning, and studying. The more they read, the more they saw things that they believed were wrong in the Church. They began connecting with groups saying the [Adventist] church was apostate. They began seeing the church wasn’t always following Ellen White’s advice.

Both of my parents were nurses, and did their pre-nursing courses at Oakwood. But as they began reading what Ellen White says about drugs and diet, my mom began to bring that into our lives. We got healthier, and we could see that. Then they focused on dress — and we began wearing long dresses. Then education — my parents decided they should homeschool us kids to keep us from the corruption of the world. So they took my brothers out of school (I hadn’t yet started). At that time, homeschool was illegal, and the principal of the school reported us. The city gave my parents an ultimatum, and threatened that us kids would be taken away.

And that’s when we went off the grid.

My parents were reading about “out of the city” in Ellen White’s books, and they believed the end of the world would be soon. They believed people who were self-sufficient and had their own gardens and so on would fare better in the time of trouble. So they decided to separate from the world, and prepare for Jesus’ coming.

We lived in a state park for a while, then moved to a 50-acre lot “on the hill.”

Did other friends of your parents also decide to go "off the grid” with them?

My parents were not the groupie type. They were independent and strong-willed. They forged ahead with their beliefs and went a degree beyond where most people we knew were willing to go. We knew others with similar ideals, but we had the entire package.

We wore long dresses and bonnets, lived without running water and electricity, had a strict diet, kept feast days, and were educated at home.

Some others may have done some of those things, but not all of them. Few lived as isolated as we did.

What was the best thing about growing up the way you did? What was the worst experience you ever had in your childhood, or the hardest thing?

The best thing: I think that our society tries to formalize children’s education too soon. Children need to roam. They shouldn’t spend hours at a desk at age six. They need to explore and touch things, experience things. We were allowed to see nature and do things. We would dissect animals we found and look for their organs. Once we dissected a dead snake we found, then a dead rabbit. We couldn’t find enough dead things, so one day my brother Jeff found a big old grasshopper, took his knife and just sliced his head off. We learned a lot just by being out there doing and seeing. Our education was very practical and hands-on.

Another thing that was really good was the way we memorized scripture. By the time I was 16 I had memorized about 30 full chapters of the Bible. (We also had the doctrinal training, which wasn’t necessarily bad — we just had way too much.) But I will never regret learning Scriptures.

The worst thing about growing up the way I did was the conflicts. It seemed like we could never get along with other people. If other people didn’t see things exactly the way we did, we would kick them off our property. Those kinds of dissensions were hard. We had so few people to associate with as it was.

For instance, if you believe you should only eat oil in its natural state (contained in fruit, nuts or grains) and I believe I should only eat only free-running oil — then we can’t speak.

If you believe the new moon is when the slightest bit of crescent can be seen, and I believe the new moon is when it’s completely dark, we yell and kick each other out.

My family and their friends would turn into snarling devils, screaming at each other if we disagreed about the nature of man, or whatever.

You ask what the worst thing was. I’ll try to explain.

If you go to a gourmet restaurant, with everything perfect — amazing food garnished beautifully — and then, just before the plate is handed to you, they sprinkle just a little feces on the top, what do you think? It’s perfect food, right? But that no longer means anything. You find yourself in utter revulsion of everything on the plate. The entire experience is utterly ruined.

And that’s how it was. We lived in extremism. We followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit. That ruins everything. It makes you want to reject all of it, and want nothing to do with God, religion, or anyone who has so much as smelled religion!

It’s very surprising that in spite of everything you experienced, you are still a believer in God, and still an Adventist. How can you explain that? Haven’t you been tempted to leave the church entirely?

It surprises me too! How can I explain it? At age 14, the Lord Jesus got ahold of me and let me know that what I was learning was not really him. I realized something was wrong. I saw some very disturbing things, such as when my brother was very badly burned, my parents did not take him to the hospital, but experimentally treated him with natural remedies. I felt that must be wrong.

Another time, we were at an Adventist campmeeting, passing out tracts. If I am being honest, we were trying to disrupt the meetings and pull people away from the Church. And we were good at it. The more you are persecuted, the better you do, because people start feeling sorry for you.

One lady invited us for dinner, and she went out of her way to cook us a really good vegan dinner. But we didn’t eat it, and couldn’t have eaten it no matter what we she did. We asked: “What kind of oil did you use? What about salt? What type of pots, and what else have you cooked in them?” We were trying to show her that she could not meet our standards. She had gone out of her way to feed us and make us feel welcome, but that wasn’t important. I felt that something was very wrong about that.

Sometimes at age 15 or 16 I would be in my window, kneeling for hours. I wondered if every girl and woman in the whole world should be wearing a bonnet and long dress? We were taught that everything was rule-based and absolute. But I just felt something was wrong about that.

I realized I wouldn’t have the freedom to change while living at home. So I began to ask God to let me go away to school.

I went to Fountainview Academy, a small self-supporting school in British Columbia, Canada. There were 30 kids there. To most, that would be small; for me it was overwhelming with so many other kids! For some people it would have been very restrictive, but for me it was extreme freedom. I arrived in my bonnet and long dress (which I wore for a couple of months before I gave them up).

The principal there introduced me to principles. She showed me that principles don’t change, but rules do. She used some of my own arguments against me. That was an epiphany. That is what made it possible for me stay in the church, and be an Adventist.

So first, I met Jesus. Then I learned about principles. I learned a way of thinking that was more flexible and broad than the absolute, rule-based thinking I was raised with. I found a way to be, to adjust, to live in a world of color, not just black and white.

Over time, I ended up moving toward relationship-based thinking. The truth is now not a set of facts, but Jesus. I can be a Seventh-day Adventist, because this is where Christ has rooted me. This is where I can bloom. Jesus is the center. It’s very easy.

Do you believe in the inspiration of Ellen White today still?

I believe some of Ellen White’s writings were inspired, but not necessarily every word and every letter she wrote. So I tend to reject that phrase you used. I don’t think Ellen White considered herself to be inspired in that way. She always said if her writings measured up to the word of God, use them, and if not, use the Word.

I find that her writings after 1888 have a different tone and a different emphasis. The difference? In 1888 she discovered righteousness by faith. She accepted Jesus as her Saviour in a way she hadn’t before.

How is your relationship with your parents today?

My father died in 2012. My mother lives with me.

Are you close?

We are proximally close. She still has a lot of beliefs that can sometimes rub me like a jagged edge. I love her very much and care for her. She has just always been herself.

It sounds like it was your father and mother together who decided to live the way they did, rather than one of them, is that right?

It took both of them to do it. My father is the one who envisioned a lot of things, and said “This is what we are going to do.” Mother said, “Okay, this is how we are going to do it.” They couldn’t have done it without each other.

In what ways did the primitive way you grew up shape the person you are today, perhaps both negatively and positively?

All the aloneness that I experienced helped me to become a writer. I would write my thoughts. I had to express on paper what I couldn’t express to other people.

Because I was alone a lot, many social and cultural things came much later in my life. Most people just know things from growing up in society. I didn’t; I had to learn.

Everything about my life today is an outgrowth of the way I was raised. The choices were mine, but the way I grew up shapes everything.

You are now chair of the communications department at Andrews University, the flagship Adventist school. What do you credit with getting you to where you are today?

God’s guidance in my life. Him not letting me go. He talked to me when we were still living out there on the hill, and told me he had a plan for my life. I couldn’t fathom it, but I believed it. I just wanted to do something good, to make a difference somehow.

And I discovered, through writing my book, as I kept weaving together the stories, that what looked like a collection of unrelated incidents, was actually a full plot. I couldn’t see it earlier. I thought I was just sharing experiences, but in the last chapter I saw it all coming together. I realized God was weaving a pattern through my life that I couldn’t even see at the time.

Now my purpose is to bring people to him.

I don’t know where this book will go. I haven’t had time to market it. I hope it will make a difference in people’s lives, especially for people who have been damaged by religion, and by the way God has been misused. I hope this book can give them hope. I have had people say that it has.

In light of my background, it is particularly interesting and ironic that I am chair of the Department of Communication at the Adventist church’s flagship university.

I was raised in a home where we were taught that media was evil, and that we should stay out of the world.

But in Ellen White’s book Education (page 262 and 263), she talks about the whole world opening to the gospel — how Ethiopia, China, India, and our own continent are all reaching out their hands to God, with hearts crying out to Christ. Millions want to know about the Saviour.

Now, the only way I know to reach millions is through media. Because of this quote, I am convicted of the power of media.

I came to Andrews, and saw there was not a strong program to teach young people how to use media. I am now trying to fundraise, use what we have, and create programming to help change the world.

This is my passion, that God has put on my heart. I want to train young people to use their amazing talents and knowledge to develop programming that will help to reach other young people.

Read excerpts from Rachel Smith-Williams' book, see photographs, and find information about purchasing it, at www.rachelwilliamssmith.com.

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There’s something in our brains that causes us, particularly when we’re in a space we call our own, to respond less to those who we don’t quickly consider as also having ownership.

This is the seventh post in a ten-part series for Spectrum’s 2015 Summer Reading Group. Each post will be drawn from chapters of the book Unclean by Richard Beck. You can view the tentative reading/posting schedule here.

It’s been helpful for me to view Unclean from my context within a large public university and the little old building on a hill called Advent House, out of which much of my ministry life unfolds. In this particular chapter, Richard Beck’s focus on hospitality is particularly relevant to a house-based ministry, one some students come to with a desire for safety from “the world,” one that (intentionally or not) gives students an opportunity to primarily connect with fellow Adventists, and one that forever manages the tension of different “types” of Adventists living and/or hanging out with each other—trying desperately to make sense of those who have the same name but not all the same practice.

Beck would comfortably admit to each student that hospitality is hard and goes far beyond four walls. Nevertheless, the four walls of a Christian organization are a helpful place within which any of us can begin to better understand hospitality because the building speaks to many of the points Beck addresses—access, community, commitment to holiness and more.

Hospitality requires the will to embrace. Beck calls it “the communal starting point”—it must come before we start trying to define what it means to be welcoming or inclusive. Toward the end of the chapter, Beck says, “[Hospitality] is the deep psychological struggle…to make room for others within the boarders of my selfhood.” I have to want to make room—that’s the will to embrace. But still, what does embrace look like?

I’ll admit it. I want the black and white sort of clarity that comes with precise boundaries and notions of purity, and I want them even though I know they can lead to inappropriate exclusion. Perhaps my administrative eyes find it very hard to see a viable space beyond static regulations, one that can actually keep a system afloat. And most certainly, this desire to very clearly define “embrace” is a desire with which every organization wrestles. Which is why something else Beck discusses actually makes sense in my head—hospitality and embrace as individual pursuits. In the somewhat misquoted words of Mahatma Gandhi, I must be the change I want to see in the world. This isn’t to say that I pursue the change independent of or isolated from others, but that I take personal responsibility for it.

While Beck doesn’t have any plain examples for how to make hospitality a reality (and I don’t blame him even though I want them), he does speak to certain things that get in the way of this open embrace, things such as our notions of boundaries, community, oneness, connection, and more. Beck makes an interesting statement that we need to be able to analyze our individual selves and through introspection, work out some of these presuppositions that cause us to establish exclusionary practices. He says this is a tension we have to work through in that because we’re flawed, we’ll never be able to really see everything in us. This is where the “will to embrace” comes in. Before we make any judgments, we “…give ourselves to others and ‘welcome’ them…”

I understand that but I’m not satisfied with it, and would suppose neither is Beck. If hospitality is a quintessential aspect of Christianity and if Christianity is rooted in Christ then Christians attempting to be hospitable will not rely on their individual reflective processes in order to sort through the ideas that are getting in the way of that willing embrace but will move to a much deeper, rigorous, and humbling position of asking the Holy Spirit to work out all those things; not just asking for them to be revealed but asking for transformation to take place and putting in the hours and years needed to see that change through.

In the midst of that and after any amount of transformation, consistently asking the Spirit to reveal to us what hospitality should look like is what I would consider another essential step because hospitality manifests itself in different ways. For example, the Spirit will enable us, if we are willing, to understand who truly is a “monster” (as Becks discuses) and the Spirit has the ability to help us understand to what degree we open our arms and to what degree we do some healthy self-protection or protection of other selves. There is a need for us to have a flexible notion of hospitality because there are times when picking up a hitchhiker isnot the way to go just as there are times when we should open up our door, figuratively or literally, to someone. These are the sorts of details we can’t always discern with our own smarts.

Hospitality is rigorous and I want to believe that at some point we can truly be transformed into those who prioritize people over policy, aren’t living based on a fear of who people are, aren’t relying on speculations or generalities and are able to see the good and be the good regardless of what we see. But we’re limited and I struggle with Beck’s notions of our limitations, not because they’re false but because he doesn’t push us further to the work that I believe the Holy Spirit is able to do.

Now back to Advent House, a space that doesn’t actually belong to any of us—the students, chaplains or board members—yet is ours. It’s very easy within that space to assume unhealthy levels of ownership to a point of exclusion. So what should I tell the students? How can I help them develop the will to embrace? For the most part, they’ve grown up with the idea of tolerance and can appear accepting of anyone yet not fully make room for them. That work of securing human dignity “beyond all question or doubt” sounds good but is daunting, not only for the 19-year-old sophomore but also the 24-year-old graduate student.

There’s something in our brains that causes us, particularly when we’re in a space we call our own, to respond less to those who we don’t quickly consider as also having ownership. Were we meeting in a different classroom each week, the sense of ownership to the literal space would drastically decrease and there would be something else about our gathering time (like program flow) that defines who’s in and who’s out.

It’s important for us to really push the discussion on hospitality further to an acknowledgment of our need for divine aide in this process of developing a will to embrace, no matter what embrace may look like in the end. Perhaps the discussion of hospitality should be paired with one on selflessness and the abdication of control—alas, is that what Beck’s been saying all along?

Michaela Lawrence Jeffery is a pastor working in public campus ministry, daily challenged by the unexpected which often includes the grace of God.

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For conservative Adventists, the implications of the auspicious visit are unequivocal: This is a clear fulfillment of the prophecy Revelation 13. The beast of the earth (America) is finally paying homage to the beast of the sea (Papacy). Or is it?

Adventists all over the world are watching with interest the events unfolding this week in Washington D.C. as Pope Francis is visiting the United States and speaking to Congress. In preparation for this event, independent ministries have mailed out thousands of unsolicited Great Controversy paperbacks to mailboxes in Philadelphia. The web and social media have exploded with links to Revelation seminars, videos and articles.

Or is it?

Our official reading of Revelation 13 pits the Adventist remnant against monstrous beasts of the end time. The beast that rises from the sea is Catholicism led by the Pope and the beast from the earth is the modern day America. As they unite to persecute the little flock of the faithful in the end time, they impose the mark of the beast (Sunday Law) and trigger the second coming of Christ.

Ellen White practically canonized these interpretations by Uriah Smith and John Andrews when she admittedly copied and pasted them in The Great Controversy as emblematic of the best Adventist thought at the time.

But the traditional Adventist interpretation of Revelation 13 as applied to modern day Papacy and America faces many challenges. I will briefly focus on two.

The first is the fact that a prophecy portending events 2,000 years in the future would be utterly irrelevant to the seven churches for which Revelation was originally intended. The book was supposed to be read out loud in the churches in the first century, probably enacted, but most importantly, understood.

Thus the likelihood that John intended to refer specifically to a nation in a then unknown part of the world (America) in the 21st century and modern day Papacy in Revelation 13 virtually ignoring 2000 years of church history is next to nil. Prophecy may be predictive, but it must be grounded in relevance to its original audience.

A second reason why Revelation 13 probably does not predict entities and powers in the distant future specifically is that, in general, the symbolic prophecies of the book of Revelation were not really meant to be decoded in terms of events, entities or future world powers. The language of the book is just too ambiguous and highly symbolic for narrowing down fulfillments. In case a specific entity seems to be referred to, then a source must be found in the immediate context of the original readers, such as Jezebel (Rev 2:20) an actual person in the church of Thyatira.

Take for example, the number of the beast in Rev 13:18. An intriguing interpretation posits that the beast from the sea (13:1-10) symbolized the Roman emperor vying for veneration as Dominus et Deus (possibly referring to Nero) and the beast from the earth (13:11-18) symbolized the local arm of the Roman government which enforced such adoration by building images and temples dedicated to the Emperor. Surprisingly, according to Suetonius, Nero's name was veiled in at least one contemporary riddle that went like this:

Count the numerical values of the letters of Nero's name,
And in "murdered his own mother," You will find their sum is the same.

Both values add up to 1,005 in Greek gematria. This is indeed a striking parallel with the riddle of 666 as "number of the beast" (Rev 13:6). This important evidence may be one more nail in the coffin of the false Vicarius Filii Dei interpretation which lingers stubbornly in the global Adventist South. But this is just one possibility. The fact is that the definitive culprit, guilty of such bestial actions and disguised in a sea of symbolism, remains at large.

This is one of the many possible sources for imagery in the book of Revelation. The high symbolism in the book is precisely the pitfall of historicism as Adventists practice it. The cryptic language leaves the interpretative field wide open to those historicists who would like to place their own favorite modern-day protagonist as the ultimate fulfillment of any given prophecy. Case in point, the beast carrying a harlot in chapter 17 has given rise to the wildest applications and a morass of theories, most of them involving a sequence of popes as the beast’s heads.

As scholars of Revelation have been pointing out for the last few decades, the book seems to be more preoccupied with the "psychology" of Christianity than its dogmas. In other words, by concocting an expressive visual, auditory masterpiece, Revelation's author wants to impact readers to stand up to the many beastly powers menacing their allegiance to Christ from the dawn of the Christian era to the end of time. Even Ellen White hinted at this when she suggests that the messages to the seven churches have elements that are applicable to all churches in all ages.

So the principles of Revelation 13 may be applicable to the U.S. and to the Papacy but such applications are just not meant to be “absolute.” Thus the "idealist" school of prophetic interpretation provides a much more sensible reading of Revelation. Idealist readings are more concerned about the overall principles of the text rather than specific interpretations.

As attractive as it seems to be able to identify characters that may confirm our own theological biases, our first task as Bible students is to respect the intention of the author. If you can't be sure, as is often the case in the most enigmatic passages of Revelation, the safest way forward is to be less dogmatic. Instead, we should look for the general principles of the kingdom of God portrayed in the passage.

We should be concerned that in attempting to enforce our only interpretation of Revelation 13 to the Papacy and America, we have effectively neutered the text. It can no longer speak dynamically today, but must apply either to a medieval religious power or a future triumvirate of devilish politico-religious powers. Surely having the Pope as a collective target to shoot at has strengthened our sense of “community” and “prophetic movement". But was that really the intention of John the Revelator?

The Papacy has also been called the fulfillment of all “antichrist” prophecies in the New Testament. But that view also has its own problems. The obvious meaning of antichrist is to be “against Christ". Is the Pope really “against Christ”? We may take issue with the Pope’s interpretations of many doctrines but this does not mean he is against Christ.

The Pope’s Christology may be faulty, but so is that of many Adventist preachers who advocate a Christ with sinful human nature for example; or a Christ whose sacrifice on the cross was insufficient for salvation. Are they not preaching a diminished Christ? Are they “anti” the Christ of Scripture? How do we decide what qualifies one to be antichrist? Does not fully understanding who Christ is and what he did qualify one to be an antichrist? Or is an antichrist someone who lives in continuous rebellion against the principles of the kingdom of Christ? In that case, I fail to see how the Pope could be described as THE antichrist.

Okay, I get the adrenaline rush such readings of the end times provides. I was born and raised in that milieu. I was in the last generation theology camp for a long time; in those quarters, one needs the theological high this approach to prophecy provides. But we must temper our desire for the dawn of end time with careful application of the prophetic message as the author intended it, especially when considering his original readers.

I remember vividly that when G. W. Bush took office, I preached a sermon in which I showed a photo of him greeting Pope John Paul II. I spoke in ominous terms alerting the congregation that this was a clear fulfillment of prophecy.

But nothing came of it.

And I suspect that nothing prophetically significant will come out of the Pope’s visit to the US this week.

André Reis has degrees in theology and music and is currently finishing a Ph.D. in New Testament at Avondale College. His thesis is on the book of Revelation.

______________________________

Recommended Reading:

Jon Paulien. The Deep Things of God. Review and Herald, 2004.

Richard Bauckham. The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1993.

Adela Yarbro Collins. Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Revelation: Vision of a Just World. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburger Press, 1998.

________. Revelation: Justice and Judgment. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

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On September 11, Spectrum published "Perspective: Clarifying 'Understanding Ice Core Science,'" in which D. Stuart Letham and Col J. Gibson provided a robust critique of an article in the Record on Ice Core Science and the age of the earth. The article generated many comments, some critiquing the conclusions Latham and Gibson reached in their article. Below, the authors respond to the comments their first article generated.

On September 11, Spectrum published "Perspective: Clarifying 'Understanding Ice Core Science,'" in which D. Stuart Letham and Col J. Gibson provided a robust critique of an article in the Record on Ice Core Science and the age of the earth. The article generated many comments, some critiquing the conclusions Letham and Gibson reached in their article. Below, the authors respond to the comments their first article generated. -Ed.

Reply to respondents:

The authors (Letham & Gibson) original aim was to state clearly, and simply we hoped, our understanding of what we saw as an obvious misunderstanding of science with respect to ice cores. We did this to assist readers who wanted to learn what science has to say about ice cores, and to observe how that relates to the Bible as we understand it. We make no claims to being theologians.

That means, of course, that this reply impinges on our (both readers and authors) understanding of science and also the Bible (scripture).

First, however, we want to thank all who read our article and particularly those who responded with further comments to advance our mutual understanding of the subject and its implications.

Second, we want to reply to the more significant issues raised and further clarify, where necessary, and again - as we see it. Several thought we had “not gone far enough,” but going further risked impinging upon our personal beliefs, and also on other areas not addressed in the original article, and probably best addressed in a subsequent article or articles. At this stage we intended merely an attempt at clarifying science and its aims and what it might have to teach us specifically with respect to ice core research. In doing this we also sought to understand how well it reveals nature (God’s second book) as we accept both reveal the same authorship--God. Consequently, we expect both to be in agreement. We did not set out to attempt to harmonise, but we were happy to note harmony where we thought it existed.

The “old” earth--recent creation concept we mentioned, generally was not well received by respondents. However, it is of course not new. The basic idea (i.e. Genesis 1:1 was separated in time from Creation Week) was accepted by some of the early leaders of the Adventist Church about 1900 and a two-stage creation identical to our suggestion is accepted by many Adventists today (G. Pfandl, J.Adventist Theological Society, Vol. 14, 176-194, 2003). Some of the respondents were clearly YEC (the entire planet and the universe created 6 to 10,000 years ago), while others may have been theistic evolutionists. Because we invoked the Gap proposal, one respondent considered we were conceding ground to evolutionists. Hence, we would like to make our belief position clear. We are creationists and do not accept evolution, theistic evolution, or any form of evolution; we accept the biblical creation week of literal days, 6 to 10,000 years ago.

In the original article, we gave the date for Creation Week derived from Biblical chronology as about 6,000 years before the present (BP) based on the recent recalculated date (3959 BC) of Ashton (J.F. Ashton, in Evolution Impossible, Master Books, AR, pp. 195-196, 2012). However, some uncertainty remains and 6-10 thousand years as used herein may be preferable.

Some brief comments on specific issues or statements relevant to our original article made by respondents follows:

1. The Importance of Timing of Creation.

Several respondents stated that this issue was not important to their personal faith. Maybe so. However, we were saying that we thought it very important to some, especially science-literate young people. The teaching of YEC as scriptural that the entire planet and even the universe were created 6 to 10 thousand years BP has caused many familiar with science to reject the entire Bible, and consequently salvation and the Advent (i.e. Second Coming of Christ) message. If the idea that the great ice sheets that once covered northern US/Canada and Eurasia were caused by a post flood ice age is added, the exit from the church could be even faster. Such views on the flood are not biblical, as we see it, and therefore have no scriptural foundation.

2. The End of the Ice Age and Eden.

One respondent questioned:
a. If there could be any connection between the end of the Ice Age and timing of life in Eden.
b. He said, We don’t know where Eden was located, and
c. We don’t know the extent to which it was affected by glaciation.

Let us address (b) first:

Modern geology suggests that the Garden of Eden was located at the top of the Persian Gulf based on the identification of the dry river bed of the “missing” river Pishon (C. Hill, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, V. 52, 31-46, 2000). Although uncertainty remains, it seems likely that the Garden of Eden was located in or near the Euphrates Valley (Iraq). We can now rephrase question (c) thus: At this location during the Ice Age, was climate markedly different from that at this site at 10,000 years BP when global temperatures were normal and similar to those of today?

To approach this question, general comments about glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere provide a basis.

Only Canada and the northern part of U.S. and Eurasia were covered by the ice sheets (2-3 km thick). However, all of the Northern Hemisphere appears to have been severely affected by glaciation. Thus, climatic events revealed by the Greenland ice cores were also evident in stalagmites in China, Borneo, Turkey, Israel and Oman. Transition from the glacial maximum to early Holocene caused rises in sea surface temperature (SST) in both Eastern and Western Mediterranean (8-10°C), in Arabian Sea (3°C) and South China Sea. Studies of past cave temperatures in Israel revealed an 8°C rise caused by the above transition.

The Younger Dryas (YD) was the terminal phase of the last glaciation and its sudden onset and short duration (about 1,200 years) render its effects easy to distinguish. Identification of pollen species in lake sediment cores taken during this cold period revealed very marked changes in the species present. Hence the fall in temperature (about 7-8°C) was sufficient to greatly modify plant ecology. Similarly, the cold, dry and windy weather of the YD induced replacement of pine forest by tundra in Southern Alaska and caused biological changes in the Cariaco basin of Venezuela. Because of proximity to the likely location of Eden, the region between the Jordan Valley and the Euphrates merits special consideration. Studies of lake sediment cores revealed that it had become largely a desert-like steppe caused by the cold and drought of the YD. Much of the woodland had died and some rivers disappeared. However, a global temperature rise of about 7°C, probably in only a decade, induced the end of the YD at about 11,700 years BP. Subsequently temperatures gradually rose further and stabilised at about 10,000 years BP. With increased rainfall, the above area then became highly fertile, agriculture developed and the region became part of the Fertile Crescent.

The above observations show that glaciation revealed by ice cores markedly degraded climate and adversely affected plant growth generally in the Northern Hemisphere. Based on lake sediment cores, the answer to rephrased question (c) is affirmative. The glaciation would have devastated the flora of the region adjacent to, and perhaps including, Eden. Since the YD glaciation caused collapse of society and adoption of a mobile hunter-gatherer life style in the Levant and Syria (region north and NE of Israel), the effect on life in Eden could have been equally severe (question (a). Cessation of glaciation seems to be a prerequisite to initiation of edenic life. In Eden temperatures after Creation were “mild and uniform” (P&P p. 61). The ice core record shows that the earth experienced such conditions after about 10,000 years BP, which thus could be the probable date for the biblical creation week. This accords with Scripture.

Prior to this time, the earth experienced a severe ice age (glacial maximum about 23,000 years BP) with very variable temperatures and the ice age lasted for about 95 thousand years with varying intensity.

3. The significance of Pollen and Bacteria in Ice Cores Prior to 10,000 years BP.

In writing the article, the authors purposely avoided mention of these organisms in ice cores prior to creation week. Perhaps mistakenly, we felt it was not necessary as it would only incite more controversy by bringing into focus the question of life before Creation Week. In any case, our article discussed ice cores in relation to the occurrence of the biblical creation week, nothing more. However, because pollen and bacteria were invoked by respondents as a criticism of our old earth-recent creation concept, we will make a brief comment for what its worth.

Yes, pollen does exist in ice cores. We recognise that. But the level of pollen in some deep ice cores is so low that it is difficult to quantify and does not make a convincing study; some bacteria appear to occur in ice cores but some can be derived during the drilling process. However, pollen clearly occurs in lake sediment cores dating back well before 10,000 years and the plant species can be identified. Hence, some plants appear to have grown on the earth prior to the biblical time for creation week and there is good evidence that cyanobacteria, which also photosynthesize were also present. The earth needed a source of oxygen and God designed plants with the ingenious enzyme system to convert water into oxygen, a system still imperfectly understood by science. In this way, the atmosphere was enriched in oxygen in preparation for humans.

The pollen in lake sediment cores prior to 10,000 years BP calls into question YEC beliefs, but it does not contradict Scripture, which is silent about the presence or absence of plants on the earth prior to creation week. Their presence would not negate creation week when a great diversity of plants and animals were formed and man was created in God’s image.

Lets us appreciate the beauty of Genesis 1 and 2 and the significance of recent articles in the Recordand other Adventist journals concerning creation/evolution. In the Record we find: J. Standish, 27 March (2015); S. Ostring July 18 (2015); C. Leimena, August 15 (2015). In Adventist World: C. Wahlen, September (2015).

Col J. Gibson worked in accounting in industry for a decade before taking an academic position as a senior lecturer in accounting at universities in Australia, New Zealand, and the University of South Pacific (Suva, Fiji).As a natural naturalist from an early age he has been active, as a hobby interest, in helping many professional scientists in fieldwork, and now in retirement still acts as a citizen scientist, which includes field observations and bird photography.

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In 1966, the late, great folk-singer Phil Ochs joined Allen Ginsberg in famously declaring the Vietnam War over. His pronouncement occurred nearly three years before Nixon got around to pulling out American troops and nine years before the actual end of the war.

At a certain point you keep saying, 'indecent, indecent,' and the words lose their meaning. It’s just the sound of syllables; it’s not a word any more. So last June, some of us in America declared the war over from the bottom up and celebrated the end of the war. We’ve been celebrating ever since… It is the use of absurdities, the use of a form of street theater, rather than just straight moral protest. The use of the theatrical is changing reality in your heads."

For Ochs, announcing the war over was not irrationality, but a moral imperative, an act of empowerment. It was a responsibility to envision the end of unjust violence and, in imagining it to be so, to help make it a reality.

When I was asked to join the RIP GC: An Adventist Funeral team, I understood the undertaking to be one of protest against a church system that now stands in the way of the very essence of the gospel. However, declaring the General Conference (GC) and its moral authority dead is much more than simply using absurdities. The assertion carries with it a wide range of theological and emotional significance, particularly for those who have been deeply hurt at the General Conference’s hands. Their experiences must not be overlooked. Further, this protest must be informed by those who know first hand what it means to be systematically disempowered and excluded from their congregations and communities.

What follows does not represent a definitive stance of the RIP GC leadership team. Rather, it is my understanding of the Seventh-day Adventist administrative body’s delinquency in upholding the gospel, and its failure to the people it has shunned and hurt. It is a call to join and hear their voices, to act in power and protest.

Fundamental to Christianity are the connected concepts of reconciliation and liberation. The entire Christian narrative hinges on the idea that God has created and interacted with the world for the purpose of reconciling humanity with the divine, with each other, and with the whole of creation. However, the world as it is impedes that kind of unity.

Human political, economic, theological, and cultural systems fight against the reconciliation of Christ. Christians are called to the work of liberation, to the tearing down of oppressive systems and to the ideological freedom provided by such acts. It is on this theological foundation that I say the General Conference is dead.

I do not mean this idealistically in some imagined future. I mean that as a vessel of the life given through Christ, as an agent of moral authority to discuss the will of God, the General Conference has worked against the gospel’s call for reconciliation and is anti-Christian. Therefore, in a very real way, the GC and its moral authority are dead.

Still, any realist can see that General Conference President Ted Wilson and his associates continue to assert their authority as leaders of a Christian movement. The conflicting realities of the General Conference's demise and its continued assertions of legitimacy present a Christian imperative to tear down the oppressive power structure in an act of righteous liberation. We are called to reconciliation--not with the General Conference, but with the larger body of Christ--those enacting the Kin-dom of God, the community of shalom.

Who Should Be Liberated?

In the creation account, God is said to have made humanity, “In his image” (Gen. 1:27). This places in each person the image of God, regardless of gender, race, sexual identity, or economic status. Therefore, through our encounter with others, we encounter the divine. This is problematic for the Adventist Church, in which individuals are excluded on the basis of gender, race, sexual identity, and economic status. Proverbs 17:5 notes, “Those who mock the poor insult their Maker.”

Anyone who excludes LGBTQ individuals from the church or women from leadership refuses to recognize their dignity and denies the image of God in them.

The biblical narrative offers a similar scenario. When the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, their captors considered them less-than-human. They denied their dignity. God demonstrated her character by entering into human politics to liberate them. Therefore, when we ask who should be liberated, the first answer is, those who are excluded, the people who have been arbitrarily marginalized. It is only then that a true image of God can be seen in the church.

This also does something to the people who have not been excluded; we are also liberated. It offers us an opportunity to see God and to identify where divinity is being oppressed. It changes our perspectives and opens our eyes to the meaning of the gospel.

The funeral is a space to heal and mourn. Funerals offer rituals of closure that prepare us for life after the funeral. In that sense, this ritual is meant to liberate us all.

We need pastors and congregations faithful enough to boldly speak the gospel, a narrative with political implications. In this case, liberation requires a dive into church politics. Let those with ears to hear listen to the marginalized, and cultivate and strategically wield the political power necessary to fight for the gospel in practical terms.

What Should Be Reconciled?

Some of our critics have said that our form of protest attempts to tear apart what we should consider sacred. They claim that division in the church (meaning the GC) is wrong. I maintain that the GC is not what needs to be reconciled. We don’t need to be reconciled to the GC, we need to be reconciled to God, to each other, and to all of creation. That is the overarching reconciliation intended by the whole of the Christian narrative. Practically, this means understanding ourselves as part of an ecumenical Christian movement and part of the world movement for peace and justice. We must be reconciled to the image of God in the people around us--to the prophets of racial justice, the martyrs of LGBTQ rights, and the saints of feminism.

What Does This Practically Imply?

What does it mean to declare the GC dead? First, it means seeing ourselves free of the General Conference as a theologizing body. In this summer’s General Conference Session we saw an example of how a majority vote ruled against the gospel to exclude women pastors. The gospel does not conform to majority opinion; it is most often found on the margins with the oppressed.

Second, the death of the GC gives us all back our birthright to Adventism, and drops us in the broader, deeper waters of Christianity. Our friends at Church 1.0 in San Francisco are a majority Adventist community outside of the General Conference, a safe space for LGBTQ individuals and others who have been marginalized. With the GC dead, they are no more and no less Adventist than any of us. We are reunited as family. For those hoping for regional jurisdiction on ordination, the power is now in your hands.

Finally, it means we are left to figure out what to do as members of the body of Christ. Perhaps, with the GC’s demise, some will declare Adventism itself dead. Others will walk away from the church. Some will find beautiful hope and help shape a future I am too nearsighted to imagine. The results of the death of the GC are up to you. They require sifting and imagining. They require action and liberation.

What Future Do We Envision?

Whatever might happen, the death of the GC brings with it a warning for all of us. The death caused by a refusal to see God in the other and a stubborn ambition to exclude could be our death as well. Whatever future we move towards, if it is one of the gospel, it must be most interested in the plight of those on the margins. It must reject oppression and must prioritize Christian service to all.

Sterling Spence is lead singer for the indie folk-rock band, Coyote Bandits, a graduate of La Sierra University (Religious Studies & Business Management), and a student at the Graduate Theological Union (MA Ethics and Social Theory). Sterling grew up in the Pleasant Hill Adventist Academy and Seventh-day Adventist Church near the offices of the Northern California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

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Filmmaker Kyle Portbury talks about the new church-sponsored feature film he directed about the early Adventists, shot on location in a pioneer village in Ottawa, Canada.

Filmmaker Kyle Portbury directed a new full-length feature film about the history of the early Adventist church, with almost 100 actors, shot on location in an operating pioneer village in Ottawa, Canada. Tell the World was sponsored by the Australian Union Conference, and was designed to be translated into multiple languages and distributed globally. In this exclusive interview, Portbury tells Spectrum what it was like to make the movie and what he learned about our early church pioneers.

Question: Tell the World is a new feature film that tells the story of the early Adventist church, produced under the auspices of the Australian Union Conference. How did you come to direct the film?

Answer: Back in 2011 in my role as Creative Director of Film and Television at the Adventist Media Network in Australia I had just finished post production on Beyond the Search, a multi-million dollar series and had started filming the CHIP (Complete Health Improvement Program) re-make for Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing.

And that was when the Australian Union Conference approached Adventist Media Network with a proposal to develop Tell the World; I was the right director in the right place with the right skill set at the right time.

I had a very strong vision for the film, and being a lifelong Adventist it was a good fit. I am grateful to the executive producers from the Australian Union Conference who trusted me to be able to get the performances they needed to tell their story. They had seen my previous work and liked what they saw — that always helps to get you the job.

The film features William Miller, Ellen Harmon, Joseph Bates, James White and other pioneers of our church. Did professional actors play these characters? What did you do to try to bring these 19th century characters to life? What did the actors know about the characters they were playing?

Yes, all actors in the film are professional actors from the Ottawa area, or grew up in Ottawa and work out of Toronto.

The actors were amazing, committed people who all embraced the challenge of portraying real people who actually lived.

We are lucky that as a church we have curated a treasure trove of primary resources on all these pioneers; the actors were able to read their letters and research their lives extensively. Tommie for example, who plays Ellen, immersed herself in research and reading White’s books, letters and other writings, along with talking to our church historians. In addition she attended an Adventist church over a couple of Sabbaths in Toronto and told me it was one of the most welcoming experiences she has had anywhere. (Well done, members of that church in Toronto — way to represent your faith and leave an impression.)

It was such a privilege to be able to see how non-Adventists responded to our pioneers. They didn’t see the baggage we have placed around Ellen, Joseph Bates, James White, etc — they saw a real person within the personal writings and it was refreshing to have someone remind you that these were real people who struggled with the same things we wrestle with today. When you discover that you can relate to them as people, what they said and wrote about gains some context.

Historical dramas have the potential to just look like actors dressed up in old-fashioned clothing, speaking stilted lines. It can be hard to immerse the audience in the action, and make it believable. Did you find this to be a challenge?

Bringing to life a 19^th century character is largely the same as bringing to life a modern day character: we have to believe them. By this I don’t mean we have to believe that is actually Ellen White on screen but we do need to believe that the emotions and intent we are seeing from her are real. If Ellen White’s goal is to inspire James White to continue printing, then she has to inspire him — you can’t pretend to inspire someone. You the actor either inspire the other actor or you don’t. If you don’t, we shoot another take. If you do we might still shoot another take. That’s acting; it isn’t voodoo or magic, it’s just being truthful on camera. If the emotions are true we’ll buy that it’s 1844 because we believe the people we are seeing are experiencing a real emotion and that will distract anyone from seeing the fake walls and the odd watch an actor forgot to take off.

Again, the challenge is truthful performances. You can play simple tricks like un-contracting words; for example in the 19^th century you would say “I will” as opposed to “I’ll”. But as I said, we’ll suspend our disbelief if we see a real emotion: joy, elation, heartbreak, sorrow. We’ve all experienced those emotions so we know what they look and feel like. If it looks and feels right I’m in 1850s New England; if it doesn’t I’m watching some people in 2013/14 dressed up in period costume pretending to be people we’ve heard of. When it's released, you can be the judge on how well we did.

Is the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844, the major focus of the movie's narrative arc? What cinematic techniques did you use to highlight the night's impact on those who believed it was the end of the world?

It’s a big plot point for sure. Essentially Tell the World is a story about trust. The pioneers trusted God was coming back — the evidence was clear. Bam! October 22, 1844 comes and… he doesn’t show up. From that point on it’s a story of the journey to restore trust.

We utilized very simple techniques, mainly focused on character development. We built up the moment and the expectation over a period of time by getting to know and like the people, then we crushed our heroes. All the pioneers recount weeping bitterly all morning. I stay in very close shots on the main characters before and after the hour comes and goes so you feel what they feel. It’s simple but effective.

We also choose a color treatment in the build up to 1844 using warm tones in our scenes. This visually suggests positivity, excitement and expectation. Immediately after the hour passes we cooled the color tones creating a sense of sterility, unwelcoming and harsh. As the pioneers deal with the fallout and regain their trust and begin to focus on the mission we re-introduce the warm tones.

What did you find to be the greatest challenge or difficulty in making Tell the World? What was the most fun?

The greatest challenge by far was not having editorial control of the final film. As essentially a director for hire I worked closely with the client, the Australian Union Conference and the Adventist Media Network, and delivered what I believe is an excellent 110-minute film.

The film that will be released later this year is different from what I envisioned for the story, which is a shame, but it was not my film and not my money. While I worked hard to deliver a powerful experience for the church with a strong story structure and clear plot progression (something that’s important to a film director), I had to be adult enough to recognize that when you make a film for an organization like our church (which is culturally very cerebral and not very emotional), a film aimed at the heart is never going to win out against a film aimed at the intellect. That’s the risk I took and yes, it’s disappointing (pun intended) that the film aimed at the intellect won out. That’s the way it goes. Plenty of directors have films in their back catalogue that aren’t the film they envisioned. What they show are the films the producers made, so I join very illustrious company.

I was extremely blessed to be given the opportunity to direct a film of this size and scope at all, and despite my comments above, I’d do it again even if I knew the outcome would be the same. As filmmakers we want to tell stories, and those stories become our passion. I had a wonderful experience directing during production with a great cast and crew. God blessed us incredibly in every way possible.

We were the biggest film to shoot in Ottawa (Canada’s capital) in the last five years. So we were big news and it was amazing to see the awareness of Adventism grow from almost zero to “Hey, you’re the lovely people who respect everyone and give us Friday at sundown to Saturday evening at sundown to recover from the work week.” There is a whole film community in Ottawa who are used to working 18 hours a day, seven days a week for eight weeks in a row while a movie is shot — they want us to come back so they can enjoy Sabbath again!

So how is the finished film different from the film you delivered to the Australian Union Conference?

I am not able to answer that question at this time.

You had 97 actors, as well as 1,000 extras, and 157 crew. Was it difficult to manage such a large cast and crew? What directing experience do you have?

I had a great team around me. The cast and crew in Ottawa were hard-working professionals and that made the shoot run very smoothly.

I trained as a professional actor and director at The Drama Centre London and have spent the last 10 years directing productions big and small all over the world both for the church and independently. I’ve been blessed that a few have been recognized for awards and film festival selections around the world. A couple have had limited cinema releases and a few have gotten TV deals.

I’ve been particularly blessed to direct a couple of big Adventist series like Beyond the Search and CHIP. Its one thing to have someone like your work and enjoy your storytelling, it’s another to find out that someone came to know God and his character through watching one of your films and then more importantly as a result they connected with some Adventist whose life was reflective enough of that character that the person gave their own life to God. That’s the best review you’ll ever get and one where the credit goes to God and not you.

How was such a large production paid for?

The Australian Union Conference stepped out in faith and funded the majority of the budget with additional funds coming from the South Pacific Division, the General Conference and the Canadian Governments film tax credit program.

What did you learn about our church's beginnings while working on this project? Did you do lots of your own research?

Oh yes, I think I’ve read about all of Ellen White’s letters and a good number of her books. I read writings by James White, Joseph Bates, biographies on William Miller and his personal writings, and I also researched the various Protestant movements that influenced the pioneers before they became Adventist. I spent a lot of time looking at the culture in New England at the time outside of church circles to get a sense of life for the average person. It’s a rich time historically.

I spent two years prepping for the shoot, working closely with retired church historian Alan Lindsay who, in turn, fact checked with George Knight and Jim Nix. We also had historians in Ottawa working with the props, wardrobe and construction departments to stay period accurate with our locations, set builds and everyday items that appear in the film.

Our church beginnings were youthful and open to being led by the spirit — I learned a new appreciation of what present truth is all about. They are an inspiring group of people who had flaws and failings like all of us and that’s why I like them. I can relate to real people and it’s been eye-opening to see the people themselves, through their own writings and correspondence, dispel the myths 175 years of Adventism have created. I love for example that James and Ellen White had a feisty relationship that was imperfect. Hey, if the saints struggle with looking after the kids and doing the chores, there’s hope for all of us.

It will also be interesting for many people to see a pregnant Ellen White. So she understands parenthood, I like her more already. Now when I read her writings I see a person behind them who was a mother, wife, sister, daughter, aunty, cousin, niece — who also happened to have visions and insights from God which focused us as a movement on the Bible and helped us see God’s character more clearly. Thank you, Ellen. After spending two years researching her life, I feel like I know her pretty well, and actually quite like her.

What impact do you hope that this film will have on its viewers?

That the characters/the pioneers will resonate with people and keep them watching. It’s a great story that will change the way you see this group of people who never lost faith that God was true to his word. Despite setbacks and disappointments they held fast to the God they met in the Bible who said I will come again.

They went back to the Bible after 1844 and found the error was theirs and not God’s, but more importantly they affirmed that the God they knew before 1844 was the same God after. He kept his word, he can be trusted. That’s his character, trustworthy, and that’s the gospel right there. The three angels’ message is a call to action to get out there and spread the good news that he can be trusted — something we’ve struggled with as humanity ever since the snake asked Eve, “Did God really say…?” We’ve had trust issues with God from that moment on.

I hope that’s the impact the film will have on Adventism. That’s our identity: we trust God, everything else is background noise (and yes, unfortunately that means our love of conspiracy theories isn’t going to save humanity, fellow Adventists, turns out that’s God’s gig through Christ? Who knew – well, apparently our pioneers did.

You have accepted a new job in the communication department at Southwestern Adventist University? Does this mean you are leaving filmmaking? Do you have any future projects in mind?

No, I won’t be leaving filmmaking anytime soon. I felt strongly that God was asking me, and our family, to spend some time collaborating with the next generation of storytellers as I continue my journey as a storyteller. We desperately need Adventist storytellers who are bold in their choices and are passionate about making films that reveal God’s character to us.

I’ve been blessed with a lot of contacts in the film industry — wonderful people who want to help nurture talent as well. Already we have placed one of our students on an eight-week internship on a big budget faith-based film shooting in the Dallas/Fort Worth area this September and October. It’s important to encourage and create opportunities for these new voices to flourish. (I’ll probably be going cap in hand to some of them 10 years down the track when they are big filmmakers asking them for work.)

Currently I’m attached to direct an independent feature film back in Australia slated for late next year and I’m also developing a number of films and TV series with production companies here in the US. Again, the goal is to give our communication majors here at Southwestern Adventist University the opportunity to intern on their professor’s films.

If I stop telling stories how do I pass on the drive and passion for storytelling?

Kyle Portbury. Top image: Kyle Portbury on set.

For more information about the film, see www.telltheworldfilm.org.

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With the controversial actions taken at the recent General Conference session, this facet of family life becomes apparent, too. Some are so discouraged by the vote on women’s ordination that they are tempted to “give up on” the Adventist church, and look for other sources of spiritual meaning, support other forms of religion, if they do so at all.

I don’t read advice columns looking for theological insights, but this recent “Ask Amy” item in the LA Times caught my attention. A woman who signed herself “Wedding Blisters” was getting married and planned to exclude her brother’s wife from her “family wedding.” She said her sister-in-law was always unpleasant, scowled at every family get-together, and she dreaded the attitude this person would bring to the occasion. The writer said that her mother was afraid that she was “breaking up the family” by excluding her brother’s wife and she wanted Amy, the columnist, to help her find a way to “fix this rift” with her mom.

In her reply to “Dear Blisters” Amy wrote, “It’s your wedding and you are determined to have only supportive and loving people around—which makes me wonder if you’ve been to a wedding. Weddings are family events. And families tend to be populated not by universally supportive and loving people, but by overlapping webs of complex relationships, featuring some challenging (and sometimes downright awful) people” (LA Times, 8/6/2015, p. E8).

In “Believing, Behaving, Belonging,” the book I wrote on the church which Adventist Forum published years ago, I described several influential metaphors for the church—army, business, family—and concluded that of these three the image of family was the best way to express the biblical view of the church. As the Apostle Paul in particular envisions it, I proposed, the church, like a family, is a close-knit community whose members care deeply for one another, bear one another’s burdens, and share each other’s joys and sorrows. At least, that’s the ideal. And that’s what I had in mind in BBB. Amy’s answer jarred me with the realization that the family metaphor includes other features of family life as well. In fact, her description of a family sounds like something Paul might have written about some of his congregations. And it sounds like the way Adventists behave from time to time.

As the Apostle’s correspondence makes abundantly clear, however, the ideal he describes was never easy to reach. The letters he wrote to the various Christian groups he helped to found, in Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, and Galatia, for example, indicate that there was often a lack of unity and mutual good will among their members, even though he never lost hope that they would become everything God wanted for them.

This is where the other aspect of the family metaphor comes to mind. There is a givenness to one’s family. We don’t choose our family; we just find ourselves a part of it. Your family is the people you belong to, and who belong to you, whether or not you agree on everything or even enjoy each other’s company. Who doesn’t go to a family get-together now and then where things are strained, people find it hard to talk to each other, some come as late as possible and leave as soon as they can?

Still, families endure. No matter what the tensions and diversity, we generally manage to cope with and affirm each other over the years, in spite of our differences. This feature of family life has an application to the church, too. The church is our family. It is part of our identity. It’s the group we belong to, for better or worse, when we are happy with it, and when we are disappointed. True, there are people who would like everyone in the church to agree on things. There are even some in the church who would like those whose views on certain issues differ from theirs to pack up and leave. But this is not a picture of the church we need to accept, and we should not allow others to impose it on us.

Am I happy with every position the church takes and every decision it makes? Of course not. And I know others in the church are not always happy with mine. Still, I’m convinced that the things that unite us in the Adventist family are more fundamental than our differences. I know my family members are not going away. But neither am I.

Richard Rice is a professor of Theological Studies at the Loma Linda University School of Religion.

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Pope Francis’ recent visit to the United States, his first since becoming pope, provided an opportunity of a lifetime for one Seventh-day Adventist musician, but the story proved too contentious for official Adventist media coverage.

Joy-Leilani Garbutt has loved the organ and wanted to play it as far back as she can remember.

“I began organ lessons when I was about 10 years old, and shortly after that started playing hymns for church,” Joy told me in email correspondence.

She got her start at the Clovis Seventh-day Adventist church in Central California where she grew up, and then branched out to other churches. By the time she was 14, Joy had her first official job as a church organist for St. Luke’s United Methodist church in Fresno, California.

At age 18 Joy moved to Takoma Park, Maryland to be the organ and harpsichord soloist with the New England Youth Ensemble, and continued her organ studies at what was then Columbia Union College.

Following that, she pursued a master’s degree in organ performance at Northwestern University where she was the organ scholar at the school’s Alice Millar Chapel.

After Northwestern, she moved to Geneva, Switzerland to study with an organist there and found a temporary job as organ assistant at the Holy Trinity Anglican Church.

She returned stateside in 2005 and began work as the director of music at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran church, and organist at the Sligo Seventh-day Adventist Church in Takoma Park. Four years later when a position opened at the Takoma Park Adventist Church five minutes away from Sligo, Joy became that congregation’s organist and choral accompanist.

She continues working with both Takoma Park and St. John’s today, and described the differences between the congregations this way:

At Takoma Park I am part of a team of musicians who work with the director of music to create a service that encompasses a variety of musical genres. I play for weekly choir rehearsals and provide all of the organ-related service music for two services each Saturday.

St. John’s is a much smaller church (just under 100 members) and as director of music I am the only staff musician. I direct an adult choir, a K-12 youth and children’s chorus, a children’s hand chime program, and lead Sunday School music for the younger children. And of course play for the weekly services. St. John’s was the first Lutheran church that I worked for and I remember being impressed that such a small church would employ a salaried musician.”

Joy noted that in contrast to most Adventist congregations, Lutheran churches tend to highly prioritize music and professional musicians. “They treat it as a real profession, like that of pastor,” she said, “and from what I’ve seen, even a small Lutheran church will hire a musician before they hire a second pastor.”

Additionally, whereas most Adventist congregations will ensure that their musicians, paid and volunteer, are Adventist Church members, “St. John’s never asked if I was Lutheran, only if I could play,” Joy said.

She hastened to add that that both Takoma Park and Sligo have treated her very professionally.

In 2013 Joy went back to school to work on a Ph.D. in musicology with a minor in sacred music and organ studies at The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. She didn’t know it at the time, but her doctoral work there would open the opportunity to showcase her musical talent in front of a massive audience—including Pope Francis—just over a week ago.

As a part of her sacred music minor at The Catholic University of America, Joy plays the organ for the school’s chamber choir. Generally, that includes concerts in the fall and spring of each year. However on the first day of this school year Catholic University’s choir director Dr. Leo Nestor asked if she would accompany the choir for the Junipero Serra Canonization Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. during Pope Francis’ visit.

“I felt it was a huge honor to be asked to represent the school,” Joy said.

In total four organists played during the mass on September 23—two from the Basilica of the National Shrine, one from a large Catholic church in Washington D.C., and Joy. Each of the four played for different portions of the mass.

Joy remarked that not having been raised Catholic, she has taken no particular interest in popes before Francis. She suggested that part of her interest in this pope might be her paying more attention to what is going on in the world as an adult, but she had more to say about the significance of Francis’ visit and of her participation in the papal mass:

“I feel as though he is a great role model and leader, not just for the Catholic church, but for the larger Christian community, and even the secular population. (Perhaps this is what makes him such a frightening figure to some within the Adventist Church)."

She made no attempt to hide the excitement she felt on the day of the mass.

Of course on one level, it can be an adrenaline rush to be near any global celebrity. It provides an immediate cultural reference point and can help you feel connected to humanity. But this was different than attending, for example, Obama’s inauguration or a U2 concert because Pope Francis stands for something that is bigger than politics or pop culture. It was an unforgettable experience, made even more meaningful by that fact that I was able to participate in it, not just attend.”

After the event, Adventist Review contacted Joy, interested in publishing an article about her experience. News editor Andrew McChesney wrote an article that was published exclusively on the Review website entitled “Adventist Organist Plays for Pope During U.S. Visit.”

Then comments began coming in. The article’s comment section was overrun with negative responses to the story.

Throughout Francis’ visit to the United States, the Review posted a series of articles on the papacy. Among them, McChesney wrote about filmmaker and self-styled Adventist pastor Christopher Hudson’s 1 ½ hour YouTube docudrama entitled Leopard Vision, in which Hudson ties the Catholic Church to the negative imagery of the Bible’s apocalyptic literature. Hudson became notorious for helping to convert “Two And a Half Men” star Angus T. Jones to Adventism. When that story blew up in 2012, the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists clarified that Hudson was not in fact an Adventist pastor.

At the bottom of McChesney’s article on Hudson’s “Leopard Vision,” the video was embedded with the disclaimer: “This film has not been officially endorsed by the General Conference or the Adventist Review.”

Though the Review’s publishing a story on an Adventist musician playing for a papal mass may seem uncharacteristic given the journal’s tendency to prioritize stories critical of the papacy and of Pope Francis, the article featuring Joy fit within the Review’s broader capitalization on Adventist interest in the pope’s visit. Nevertheless, she was caught off guard.

“I was genuinely surprised that the Review contacted me for an interview in the first place,” Joy said. “It was not a story I expected the general Adventist community to be interested in (besides family and friends).” Neither did she (or apparently the editors of the Review) expect the backlash that followed the article’s publication. Within a short time of the article’s publication and after a volley of condemnatory comments, the article disappeared off the website.

“It took me a little while to realize that the article had in fact been pulled. At first I thought that the link I had been sent just wasn’t working. The next day I was told it was not personal, and that it was related to ‘an internal office matter.’"

Adventist Review did not respond to my request for comment on the article’s removal from the website. However, it’s not the first time that “internal office matters” have resulted in the disappearance of content created under the auspices of the Adventist Church.

In January 2014, the Adventist News Network first published, then removed an article suggesting that 10 of the 13 divisions in the Adventist Church were open to the possibility of ordaining women. Perhaps most famously, in April 2014 the General Conference halted the release of million-dollar-plus film project The Record Keeper, which it funded. An official statement said that while Record Keeper would not be released, the Church was open to the possibility of other similar creative ventures in the future.

Does the removal of Joy’s story from Adventist Review's pages speak to Adventism’s dogged adherence to an anti-papist narrative at the expense of real people’s lived experiences?

From one standpoint, the story is a great human interest story about a musician given an opportunity of a lifetime. In highlighting that, the Review got it right, prioritizing humanity over ideology. However, from the standpoint of many Adventists, the story was seemingly one bridge too far.

I asked Joy for her response to Adventists' negative preoccupation with the pope in particular and the Catholic Church generally.

"I find it all highly disappointing and I think preoccupation is a good word for it. In some ways it is an excuse for not listening, not considering that we might learn from others."

Joy said that she told Adventist Review that the mass in which she participated was about sharing the joy of the gospel and the love of Christ.

I’m not sure what Adventists find offensive about that. I went back and reread the whole sermon that Pope Francis delivered that day and I think it could be delivered just about word for word from any Adventist pastor in any Adventist church. But I doubt most Adventists would be interested in reading what Francis said because the messenger distracts them from hearing the message.”

Despite Adventists’ historic theological differences with Catholicism, Joy maintains that the Adventist Church stands to gain a great deal from inter-faith partnerships, including with Catholics.

“I don’t mean to be judgmental about this,” she says. “My work as a church musician has given me a wonderful opportunity to be involved with a variety of denominations. That’s not an experience that many people get to have, and it has made me quite ecumenical.”

Joy notes, without incredulity, that she has been welcomed by people of other faith, and wonders whether Adventists might be as gracious to, say, a Catholic organist. She also wonders what narrative might have been less offensive.

“If I had refused to play for the mass, lost my scholarship (did I mention that playing for the Chamber Choir is stipulated in my scholarship agreement?), and had to drop out of school, would that have been a more interesting story for the Adventist community? Is the headline “Adventist Organist Refuses to Play for Pope” more palatable? Is separatism and persecution more comfortable than collaboration and partnership?”

Jared Wright is Managing Editor of SpectrumMagazine.org.

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I get frustrated as my middle-aged self (an embodied self) requires more time, adaptation, and attentiveness. I want to plan my schedule, my adventures, my future, as if there will be no end and I will always be able to do what I do now.

This is the eighth post in a ten-part series for Spectrum’s 2015 Summer Reading Group. Each post will be drawn from chapters of the book Unclean by Richard Beck. You can view the tentative reading/posting schedule here.

I don’t want to die. I’m not sure that’s the same as being afraid of death. But I definitely find myself avoiding things I think might kill me. And hoping that I get to have a long, healthy life: specifically, a healthy life with few of the elements of aging in it; healthy till the last minute. And that latter sentiment is what Beck addresses in this chapter.

Beck builds on his earlier claim that disgust is related to an existential reminder—that humans are in the in-between of the divine-animal divide. We feel pulled “downward” to the animal world through our bodily functions, while at the same time that we want to be more like God. We want the “upward” spiritual elements that we associate with the divine. Beck reminds us of the earlier arguments in the book—we feel purity which is required by God and makes us more like Him is achieved by pulling away from all the things that we associate with the bodily. We mourn death even as we experience disgust toward the aging and sick and dying.

Beck’s research for this association of disgust with the animal/lower elements of life came earlier in the book, and wasn’t wide or deep enough to be convincing to all his readers. All some of us need to do is think of the nurses and other care-givers in our lives to think that this disgust isn’t as widespread as Beck’s evidence claims. However, when I look into my own heart, the truth of his assessment is clear to me.

My desire to not die may be related to my wish to avoid things that remind me of death, and specifically the death that comes with aging. In this way, I am similar to many other modern people in this mechanized, sanitized and medical age. As someone who is not a professional medical worker, I am alienated in many ways from the sick and the dying/dead. I work hard to avoid the bodily signs of aging, and not only the signs, but all the effects. I get frustrated as my middle-aged self (an embodied self) requires more time, adaptation, and attentiveness. I want to plan my schedule, my adventures, my future, as if there will be no end and I will always be able to do what I do now.

What this translates into, for me, is often a disregard for the sick and elderly. I am in a hurry and they seem slow. I want informal worship services without microphones and they are hard of hearing. I want active community service and churches that focus on the kids, and they aren’t able to participate at that physical level. I privilege the physicality that comes with what we perceive as “youth,” which also means I end up being something like an “able-ist.” I am impatient and don’t want to accommodate those whose bodies are working less well than they have in the past or which work differently than I am used to mine functioning.

My childhood theological education included the reminder that the first temptation was the first lie: “Thou shalt not surely die.” I always understood that this was the way that humans started down the road of idolatry, to rejecting the path of love that God had planned for them. Beck’s argument in this chapter reminded me of this, and that when I resist aging, or neglect to make space for the sick or elderly, I am participating in this lie. Not that I will engage in unhealthy behavior or lack of concern for my body, but I will check myself when I make assumptions about the value of certain abilities or become negligent of people (myself included) who are not at the prime of physical functioning.

I wish Beck had completed his argument with the strongest theological truth of all, the one that should undermine all our desires to become divine: God became a human. And He died. The Resurrection, that truth that completes the value of the Incarnation for us, is part of our great hope and the Good News. If we desire to avoid the human element, the bodily functions, because they remind us of animals and death, then the knowledge that Jesus, God Himself, became human and gave value to our bodies and physical functions should change everything. We should not avoid our bodies and their weaknesses in our attempt to get close to the divine. God came near to us, embraced our weakness and gives us hope in the New Heaven and New Earth.

Do you find yourself worried about dying or aging? How do you respond to the aging process? How do you make space for the elderly or those whose bodies don’t work like yours? Do you find yourself thinking more about God on His throne in the New Heaven and New Earth than of God as a human who got hungry and had bodily malfunctions and died? What difference does it make to think of our God as embodied in human flesh?

Lisa Clark Diller is a Professor of History at Southern Adventist University.

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Can we square Ellen White’s illustrious ministry with the General Conference action barring all other women from full participation in the church?

Reflecting on the July 8 General Conference vote against allowing regional jurisdiction of ordination—and by implication, the apparent attempt to exclude women from formal ministry in the Church—it is worth taking another look at what is in fact a venerable “elephant” standing all too placidly in the historical and contemporary sanctums of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The essential question that insists on an honest answer is this: How can we square the most recent General Conference Session action against women’s ordination and ministry in the Church with the venerated and authoritative ministerial service of the woman, Ellen G. White?

On one hand we have the far-reaching and fully recognized authority, scope and character of Mrs. White’s ministry in the Seventh-day Adventist Church; including the way the Church values and extols that ministry. On the other we have the way all other women are being treated as, at best, second class in the church. As much as we’d like to deny the relevancy of gender in this state of affairs, it is impossible to do so honestly and coherently, without indulging in rationalization and even duplicity.

Mrs. White’s ministry and the Church’s unequivocal and official acceptance of it, asks us inescapable questions such as: Where was God and what was he about when in the 19th Century he chose a woman to take up a key role in the ongoing development of the Seventh-day Adventist Church? How could he have called someone of the female gender to do such momentous things if he was indeed against women taking on significant leadership roles and exercising spiritual authority? Then there is the inevitable companion question: Where is God in the calling of women to Adventist ministry here and now? If God called a woman like Ellen G. White to ministry in the Church, why not call other women to similar ministries? In the light of these suggestive questions, it is disturbing to see how blithely we pass actions such as the one that was recently voted in San Antonio, without at least admitting a nod of discomfiture when it comes to the inconsistencies hiding in such actions.

Post San Antonio, the spiritual and ministerial phenomenon of Ellen White has, I think, a new look and feel to it. Her kingpin part in the overall theological and organizational development of the Church—both spiritual and structural—and the distinct “headship” role she continues to play in the guidance of the Church, calls all the more since San Antonio for honest and complete acknowledgement of our contradictory position, particularly as it relates to the present emerging role of women in the ministry of the Church. Even while we are preoccupied with reinforcing the “say” of this woman of God in the Church, many of the most avid supporters of Mrs. White’s ministry seem obsessed with finding ways to keep all other women from formal ministerial service.

We know that while ordination itself was contemplated for Mrs. White, it was not acted upon. However, the fact that Mrs. White was not ordained is all but irrelevant as one looks at the almost unbounded influence – and yes, power—our Church continues to grant her; whether she was ordained or not. This scenario has to puzzle the flawed theological theories of “male headship” that circulate in the Church. And it is interesting to note that more often than not, those whose dubious hermeneutical presuppositions put them against women in ministry are the ones most likely to quote the woman, Ellen White as a penultimate, or even an ultimate authority, as they seek to settle all kinds of theological, behavioral and organizational issues facing the Church today… including the over-strained question of whether or not women should be given the authority or standing that ordination accords the ordained minister of the Gospel in the in the Seventh-day Adventist Church; even though the authority accorded ordained women today might or would be less than that which Ellen White was given to carry out her ministry.

Thus in reality, God’s call to the woman Ellen G. White and our Church’s official recognition of his call to her, challenges any attempt to formulate a determinative theology prescribing an exclusively male ministry, even while it deals a decisive blow against the action taken in San Antonio last July.

It is also important to confirm that we simply cannot say with any rational or spiritual integrity—as some will no doubt want to say—that because Mrs. White’s ministry included an exceptional prophetic element, that that somehow places her call to ministry in a unique category of some kind, which allows us to ignore the significance of her gender. Ellen White’s ministerial calling by all means includes her unique prophetic gift, even though, at the same time, that ministry clearly stretches beyond this important role in a number of significant directions.

God called a woman to an authoritative office of ministry in our midst and we have officially and unswervingly insisted for more than a century (sometimes on pain of ecclesiastical dismemberment!) that she and her authority be explicitly recognized and honored. We have consistently maintained this as a Church, even tending to—controversially—make belief in her authority and ministry one of our “Fundamental Beliefs.” Yet we have now come to San Antonio and voted in effect to reject outright the reality that God does in fact call women to ministry in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

As we observe all the features of Mrs. White’s far-reaching ministry and as we fully acknowledge its length, breadth, height and depth, we gladly note the prodigious prophetic gift she possessed (along with the human weaknesses that were hers). But we also see her gift of preaching and teaching (No, Mrs. White was not silent in the gathered fellowship of the Church!) and perhaps yet more, her gift of writing and its ongoing authoritative, directorial role among us.

So, perhaps most significantly and surprisingly, along with all Mrs. White’s spiritual gifts, there was (and is) the very rich charisma of administrative wisdom and leadership that was so evident in this woman. Her leadership and wisdom was lavishly demonstrated and embraced (however begrudgingly at times) as the Seventh-day Adventist Church moved through its formative and later years under her highly influential guidance to become the phenomenal, worldwide organization it has become.

Looking at these very significant and far-reaching aspects of Mrs. White’s ministry, one is tempted to claim that not only did Ellen G. White possess the gift of prophecy along with other charismata, but she also demonstrated the primary spiritual gift of apostleship.

But regardless of whether or not we embrace that generous a view of Mrs. White’s ministry, it is crucial to confirm that If God so splendidly gifted a woman among us, calling her to such an illustrious, commanding and influential ministry, surely there can be no reason to preclude today’s called women from full participation in the Gospel ministry of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Will Eva, D.Min, spent a decade at the General Conference as Editor of Ministry Magazine, five years as Senior Pastor of the Seventh-day Adventist Church at Kettering (Ohio) and has served as Ministerial Secretary in the Potomac Conference and the Columbia Union.

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On September 27, 2015, the Southern Union’s President’s Council voted to approve the appeal of two local pastors, Pastor Furman Fordham II and Pastor Kymone Hinds, who are protesting the discriminatory practices of the Seventh-day Adventist Church against female clergy. The appeal requests that their status as ordained pastors would be waived in favor of taking on the classification of commissioned ministers (a classification traditionally reserved for female clergy). Pastor Hinds of the Overton Park SDA Church in Memphis, TN, explains, “When I look at the statement our church has made, saying that women are fit to be trained, women are fit to preach, and women are fit to pastor, but women are unfit to receive the same opportunities as their male counterparts, it is clear to see that we have an inequality issue.”

This type of protest is not the first of its kind. Over the past ninety days, multiple pastors throughout the western hemisphere have opted to take on the classification of commissioned ministers in order to bring more attention to the decades-old “glass ceiling” that has been placed over female, Adventist clergy. In his official letter to the South Central Executive Committee, Pastor Fordham of the Riverside Nashville Church in Nashville, TN, argues, “This request is based primarily upon my personal conviction that we have ‘arbitrarily determined’—without any biblical basis—that certain functions can only be performed by, and certain offices can only be held by, ordained ministers; and since by policy we do not ordain women, they are prohibited from performing these functions and from serving in these offices.”

Protests like these have grown in popularity since the delegates of the 60th General Conference Session “turned down a motion that would have allowed each division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to decide for itself whether [or not] to ordain women to the gospel ministry.”¹ Although the July 8, 2015 vote attempted to end the debate on women’s ordination, local pastors are discovering creative ways to stand in solidarity with female clergy as women continue to fight for equal standing within the denomination. Pastor Hinds comments, “God was showing me something that wasn’t right, and here is something I can do to express my solidarity with my sisters in ministry.” Pastor Fordham’s official letter echoes these sentiments:

According to our church policy there are only four differences between ordained (male) ministers and commissioned (female) ministers. The differences are that only the ordained can: 1) serve as president of a conference or union; 2) participate in the ordination of local elders, deacons and deaconesses; 3) participate in the portion of [the ordination ceremony] where the ordained pastors lay hands on the ordinand(s); and 4) organize churches. . . This means that by policy we currently allow women (commissioned ministers) to serve as senior pastors of our churches, presidents of our [educational] institutions, and even as general vice-presidents of our world church, but we deny them the opportunity to serve as conference and union presidents because we have “arbitrarily determined” that these offices can only be held by the ordained and we don't ordain women. In my humble opinion, that is institutional discrimination.”

Both pastors are hoping that this bold step leads to other bold steps being made in support of combating discrimination against women within the denomination. Pastor Hinds entreats, “Adventism is a movement that follows God’s leading and speaks for truth . . . so, if we are not going to make our sisters equal with us, I want to stand with them where they are. We challenge others to take their own bold and courageous step towards gaining equality for our sisters in ministry.”

¹McChesney, A., & Paseggi, M. (2015, July 8). Delegates Vote ‘No’ on Issue of Women’s Ordination. Retrieved from: http://www.advenistreview.org.

Michael Polite is a blogger and freelance writer. He is also the Lead Pastor of the New Life Fellowship and Associate Chaplain of Andrews University. You can read more of his articles on www.30withbraces.com.

Photo Credit: www.riversidenashville.org and www.opconnects.org.

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Your singling out of a marginalized faith community is ironic, perhaps hypocritical, on many levels. As a lifelong Seventh-day Adventist, I am well aware (and assume you are, too) of the fears held by many in our community of the possibility of persecution for beliefs that differ from mainstream Christianity, such as a Saturday Sabbath. Holding membership in what many view as a small, fringe faith community, it is surprising that you are giving voice to religious discrimination.

Dr. Ben Carson,

As a clergy-trained fellow Seventh-day Adventist, I urge you to stop singling out Islam and Muslims. This upcoming weekend there are anti-Muslim rallies planned across the country—some of them calling for armed protesters—fueled by the anti-Muslim rhetoric you are helping advance in mainstream America. You are profiting in fundraising and in polls off the backs of a marginalized religious minority in our country.

Recently, when talking about “American values,” you raised concerns over Islam pertaining to discrimination of women, LGBTQ people, and subjugation of those with different religious beliefs. As a presidential candidate with a public platform it’s puzzling that, in addition to calling out a marginalized religious community, you would be singling these issues out in another faith group and failing to call out discrimination within your own.

Let’s take a closer look at these issues in Seventh-day Adventism.

Church leadership recently changed its “Marriage and Family” Fundamental Belief from the language of “partners” to specifying “a man and a woman” when speaking about marriage. Such discriminatory language counters the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage from earlier this year, requiring that same-sex couples be allowed to marry anywhere in the country. Given your expressed concerns about this issue it seems like you might have similar concerns about faith-based discrimination from fellow Christians. You didn’t sound concerned over whether government employee Kim Davis’s religion was “consistent with the Constitution” when she was defying the Supreme Court by denying marriage licenses to gay couples. I would expect this kind of consistency from someone who prides himself on making choices based on values rather than political expediency.

Earlier this year, our Seventh-day Adventist church leadership once again voted against the ordination of female clergy. Without ordination, female pastors can’t lead out in regional conferences or establish churches. This stained-glass ceiling and other forms of faith-based gender discrimination run counter to American values of equality and opportunity for all.

Or perhaps your statement of concern about Islam reflects a change of heart from your previous comments about women and LGBTQ people. If that is true, I invite you to join the growing chorus of Seventh-day Adventists denouncing the moral authority of Adventist church leadership as a result of its choices to perpetuate discrimination against women and LGBTQ people.

In my current role as director of the interfaith Community Organizing Residency at Bend the Arc, I have the privilege of knowing many Muslims who are working in the non-profit sector on issues such as healthcare access, housing affordability, and public education, throughout our country. We would all be fortunate to have any one of these Americans run for president one day.

Your anti-Muslim rhetoric is not only ironic, but also immoral. I can assure you that it is not in line with our faith tradition. Our sacred texts call us to love our neighbor as ourselves—this includes our Muslim neighbor. I implore you to be a better representative of our faith community. You could start this weekend by visiting a local mosque and engaging in peaceful dialogue with our Muslim brothers and sisters.

If you want to fight faith-based discrimination, start within our own Seventh-day Adventist faith community, not with our Muslim neighbors whom we’re called to love. As a presidential candidate you are not responsible for every individual’s words and actions toward Muslims, but you are responsible for your words and actions that set a tone for conversations and actions across our country.

Geoffrey Nelson-Blake, studied to be a Seventh-day Adventist minister, and is now director of the interfaith Community Organizing Residency at Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice. This article first appeared in Religion Dispatches, and is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. Follow RD on Facebook or Twitter for daily updates.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore from Wikicommons

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Dan Weber, director of communication for the North American Division, gives us the lowdown on the Society of Adventist Communicators' annual convention next weekend, following Annual Council.

Dan Weber, director of communication for the North American Division, gives us the lowdown on the Society of Adventist Communicators' annual convention next weekend, following Annual Council.

Question: The Society of Adventist Communicators is getting together for its annual convention next weekend, October 15 through 17, just outside Washington, DC, in Chantilly, Virginia. Who will be there? What can attendees expect at this event?

Answer: The majority of the people attending our convention are professionals working in the fields of corporate communication, public relations, marketing, video production, photographers, writers and educators. The second group is made up of students studying in these same fields and looking to create networking opportunities as they near the end of their education.

We offer workshops, keynote presentations and the opportunity for people passionate about communication to come together and learn from each other.

You are the organizer of the SAC convention. Is it always the NAD communication director's job? What takes the most work in preparation for the three-day get-together?

SAC was originally the Society of Southern Adventist Communicators and about 15 years ago, the North American Division offered to help coordinate the event so that everyone in the division territory could benefit from the convention. The NAD Office of Communication has had a direct hand in coordinating the event for the past 8-10 years.

George Johnson, the previous NAD Communication Director, coordinated the event when he was first the Associate Director and then when he became Director in 2010. I inherited the role in 2014 when I became Communication Director.

I serve as the Executive Director of SAC, but we have a board that really makes all the larger decisions effecting SAC. We meet once a month via teleconference and there are roughly 15 members on the board. The majority of our time is spent in selecting and recruiting speakers for SAC and then focusing on the themes that we will focus on each year. We also decide where to hold the convention, after a selection process that includes several site visits to potential locations. When considering where to hold SAC, we look at the hotel venue, cost of flights into the location, if it is easy to get to, the general meeting room and workshops layout and whether the venue can provide high-quality vegetarian food. I probably spend about three months a year on preparation for SAC.

The Society of Adventist Communicators officially began in 1999, growing out of the Southern Society of Adventist Communicators. Why do you think this organization is needed and what does it accomplish? How does it benefit the Adventist church?

Since its inception, SAC has always been about education, thus it naturally grew into something that would help to promote our communication students and hopefully lead to more employment opportunities for them.

The most important aspects of SAC are the opportunities that are provided to our students in the areas of training, networking and potential employment. I really want to use SAC to grow the future communicators in the Church.

The Society is focused on North America. Why not more global? Will anyone be attending the convention from another country?

We have many attendees from countries overseas each year. We have never marketed SAC as an international convention because it has been based in the NAD, and also because the GC has its own GAiN conference each year and we don’t want to compete with that. I believe that each one plays an important role in church communication education.

A few years ago the Inter-American Division approached us about holding an SAC Convention in their division and we were happy to let them use the SAC name. They had a very successful convention with more than 400 people attending. Next year they will be holding one in Puerto Rico and I will be one of their keynote speakers.

A long list of awards will be given out at the convention. Can you tell us a little bit about those awards, and who might expect to be honored? Do you have lots of entries this year?

This year we had about 200 entries and will probably give away around 25 awards. The competition is tough each year. We also will give awards for Lifetime Achievement, Student of the Year, Young Professional, the Reger Smith Cutting Edge Award (for creativity) and the Award Excellence for the best submission each year. The awards are judged by a panel of industry experts, representing a variety of fields and disciplines.

Who pays for the convention?

The cost of the convention is covered by the fees each attendee pays, plus sponsorships from organizations that we allow to promote themselves at the convention. The North American Division doesn’t provide any direct funds to support the convention. When we do site visits to potential locations, those costs are covered by our work travel accounts.

What is the most fun thing about the convention? How is it different from other conferences?

My favorite part of the convention is being able to meet new people and help them grow and increase their communication skills. Every year some one comes up to me and says “Thank you, I learned so much this year.” Hearing that makes all the hard work worthwhile.

What gives you the biggest headache as the convention approaches?

Trying to meet all the deadlines is the biggest challenge each year. There are so many things that need to be done to make the convention successful. But afterwards, it is all worth it.

What do you feel is your most important task as North American Division Communication Director? What do you enjoy most about your job?

That’s a tough question! My office oversees a vast variety of projects, from SAC to the SONScreen Film Festival, running our NAD Studio, doing PR and crisis situation management, media requests, writing articles and managing the NAD content in the NAD Adventist World, to anything else that always pops up at the last second. The biggest challenge is keeping on top of everything.

What do you believe defines a good communicator?

A good communicator is someone who is willing to adapt, to grow and learn new technologies. Once you become static and stop learning, this field will quickly pass you by. That’s one of the reasons we run SAC. We want to provide opportunities for communicators to learn new skills and grow in their professional field. That’s why it’s important to have the students involved. While they are learning from the professionals in the field, they can also share what they are learning in school. It’s a unique relationship that is beneficial to all parties involved. Last year we had a student from Southern help teach a photography class. I even learned something and I’ve been a photographer for more than 30 years. It was a lot of fun!

Photo: Dan Weber at last year's convention.

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Make sure your comments are germane to the topic; be concise in your reply; demonstrate respect for people and ideas whether you agree or disagree with them; and limit yourself to one comment per article, unless the author of the article directly engages you in further conversation. Comments that meet these criteria are welcome on the Spectrum Website. Comments that fail to meet these criteria will be removed.

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This is the ninth post in a ten-part series for Spectrum’s 2015 Summer Reading Group. Each post will be drawn from chapters of the book Unclean by Richard Beck. You can view the tentative reading/posting schedule here.

At the start of Unclean, Beck quotes from a Walt Whitman poem:

This is the meal pleasantly set…this is the meal
and drink for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as for the righteous
I make appointments with all.
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept woman and sponger and thief are hereby invited…
the heavy-lipped slave is invited… the venerealee is invited,
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

According to Beck, the theology of sacrifice requires that we distinguish between the “holy” and the “unclean” or “impure,” embracing the former and expelling the latter to protect the integrity of our communities. By contrast, the theology of mercy imitates Jesus’ open fellowship and follows the counsel of James: it does not discriminate and does not exclude.

Sacrifice says “I told you not to associate with immoral people... Don’t even sit down to eat with such a person” (1 Corinthians 5:9-11). Mercy says, “I have not come to call respectable people, but outcasts… Zacchaeus, I must stay in your house today” (Matthew 9:13; Luke 19:5). Mercy sits down to eat with “such people,” regardless of the discomfort of the “righteous.” Sacrifice and mercy are inversely proportional, they both have theological and psychological roots, and while neither impulse should be easily dismissed, we can’t split the difference between the law and the Spirit.

“As any self-reflective person knows,” Beck writes, “empathy and moral outrage tend to function at cross purposes. In fact, some religious communities resist empathy, as any softness toward or solidarity with ‘sinners’ attenuates the moral fury the group can muster.” Since I started paying attention to this dynamic about six years ago, I’ve noticed it impacting several populations in the Adventist fellowship, from divorced couples, smokers, and artists to LGBT+ people,* theologians, and science professors. Once sacrifice displaces mercy as our corporate norm, we’re motivated to find every reason under heaven to justify and protect it. Beck unwittingly demonstrates this as he lays down the reasoning for his chapter on sex, the privy, and the private.

Jody Washburn reviewed Chapter 3, which introduced us to George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s research on metaphors and cognition. Metaphors aren’t reality, but they structure reality by framing our cognition about reality. They tie our awareness of our bodies to our perceptions of relationships with and in the world around us. And they are resistant to logical challenge.

For example: Beck perceives purity metaphors’ unique impact on Christian discussions of sexuality. He understands that purity-regulated sexuality entails shaming, dose insensitivity, negativity dominance, and exclusion; the network of emotions and behaviors that compose disgust support secret-keeping, and the penalty for breaking purity taboos is very deep. Yet on page 50, he insists “I am not suggesting that sexuality shouldn’t be regulated by purity metaphors.” Oh? The metaphor produces bad psychological and social fruit, and Jesus made a clear choice about it during his lifetime here, but Beck refuses to suggest that modern church members stop eating from the metaphorical tree (pp. 83-84).

Another metaphor that Beck describes but fails to question is that of the Great Chain of Being that orders all life: the chain, which he calls the “order of creation,” flows from the Divine to angels and humans and ends with beasts at the bottom (p. 50-56). This metaphor and its entailments lie beneath Beck’s discussion of social moral disgust, permanent negativity, and “humanity” lost or “imago Dei” degraded by sin or norm violations (infrahumanization). Our being made in the image of God connects humankind to the sacredness of God, but somehow that beingness can be violated, and so violations of human dignity through violations of purity are desecrations of the divine-in-humanity. This is the same divinity-purity-degradation matrix Dwight Nelson used in 2009 to proclaim sex as a potential threat to the sacred body-temple.

And so I became suspicious of Beck's we well before chapter 10: he seems determined to keep that Aristotelian Great Chain. Along with the Chain, Beck insists a ranked division between the human self and the sacred Other, and an incredibly fragile sense of humans' place on the ontological scale. “The divinity ethic,” the ethic that addresses respect, propriety, and reverence, “keeps humanity from sliding downward into the bestial, animalistic, or savage,” he writes (p.55).

How, I wondered, could human dignity be so fragile? Surely human dignity, and any rights and responsibilities that might flow from it, can only be secure if rooted in our nature, what we are, not in the fickle realms of culture, era, or sociologically governed systems of behavior. But Beck shows how fragile he thinks human dignity is as he assumes and projects outward disgust at and fear of human nakedness, urination and other natural functions, and other elements of the “private” part of life (p. 56). For Beck, nakedness implies “the bestial” and movement “away from the sacred.” I agree with him that this is a common normative judgment. I disagree that it's an appropriate one.

Even when there’s no risk of actual physical, direct harm, we judge things, people, and experiences to be contaminants, fear contact with or exposure to them, and express emotions of disgust and revulsion about them. Our a priori judgment feeds our revulsion, and our disgust fuels our policing of personal and social boundaries. Physiological taboos like those about diet and personal grooming (e.g. Leviticus 11, 19) come to serve cultural norms and customs, but we can be so invested in the social that we will use disgust to regulate others and not just ourselves, to justify expelling the Other from our midst unless they comply with our fears.

Under the strain of the logic of human sacrifice—It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not—intimate relationships buckle. Parents feel compelled to choose between participating in their children’s lives and loyally applying the church’s teachings about them. Church employees are punished for participating in LGBT+ relatives’ family events. Friends declare they “know better” than to stay close to someone they've known for nearly two decades, whose orientation is bisexual and not heterosexual. “Matthew 18!” they say to one of the few group members who has stayed in touch; they assume that his moral responsibility is to disapprove, distance, and deny a nearly two-decade friendship and judge him when he fails to agree. Two ministers, both heterosexual, have each proposed that Adventist congregations consider harm reduction: ways they can become less contentious, more spiritually nurturing environments for sexual minorities. Colleagues have mockingly dubbed one “the gay pastor” and Adventist administrators have blocked or banned the other from speaking in local churches.

These scenarios represent hundreds that I could share, are mirrored in families and social networks around the world, and demonstrate the ground-level conflict between Christian sacrifice and Christ-like mercy. “Whenever the church speaks of love or holiness, the psychology of disgust is present and operative, often affecting the experience of the church in ways that lead to befuddlement, conflict, and missional failure” (p. 90). We hear “compassion” and watch pastors threaten members with censure and disfellowshipping. We read the “academic freedom” policies and find professors having to negotiate with administrators to publish legitimate research in their fields. Disgust, repulsion, and purity consciousness inform all of this.

But Beck refuses to reconsider some of his key premises. For example, he describes the post-Reformation recovery of the ministry of all believers as a change that “diminishes” the church rather than as a revelation that helps restores communion to the Body of Christ. By retaining the dyads of higher/lower, Spirit/body, divine/beastly, he also retains the binary ranking that elevates one item in each pair over the other. To move “higher” is positive growth. To move “lower” is a degradation. The result: For God to incarnate, to not merely masquerade as human but to be human, is a “shocking disgrace” rather than God joyfully setting holiness loose in the world. And for humankind to consider god-likeness the “goal to be reached” is the inferior’s dream, Babylonian grasping at what doesn’t rightfully belong to us, rather than God’s children more fully expressing the image of their Father (pp. 69, 78-85).

Disgust, revulsion, and contamination fears are all central to our concepts of sin and holiness. As such, they influence our individual and collective boundaries and our notions of hospitality—literally who we invite for dinner, who we fail to invite, and whose invitations we withdraw (pp. 80-81). Kin members who violate our norms are subject to the indifference, instrumentality, and inhospitability we reserve for the compromised Other.

We will deposit the Other’s tithe, use the Other’s talents, and report the Other’s evangelism outcomes, but they may not join our committees, lead our ministries, or share in our ordinations. These distinctions are all failures of table fellowship: they preserve the dominating fear of pollution, entail hierarchy, imply the Other’s inferiority, and corrode the intimacy that should otherwise characterize the Body. Christ modeled an open table and wisely left it behind for us. It is, as Beck says, a teaching intervention (pp. 111-119, 132-34). If hospitality is one of the ways we make manifest the reign of God, the New World is here but its heralds are in denial.

There is a vast difference in receiving welcome, refuge, or table fellowship from chilly, hostile, and begrudging hosts versus the embrace of warm, affectionate, and big-hearted hosts. One can literally feel the difference.” —Richard Beck

“Just because you leave the door open for somebody doesn’t mean that they feel welcome.” —Marco Rogers

Welcome takes work. It can’t be forced or faked, and neither can the strength of heart that makes “no difference between them and the rest.” We’re making room in ourselves, not in “the church” because the church isn’t ours to possess or purify, it’s a whole that we’re members of. Ultimately we’re yielding room in the temple of the Holy Spirit for the Other who is, like us, God's creation and embodied likeness. First, we’ll have to transcend existential angst and our dissociation from what it means to be embodied and human.

I don’t resonate with Beck's bodily revulsion. He goes so far as to call the union of spirit and flesh “offensive” though the writer of Genesis called human creation and inspiration “very good.” It’s because of this offense/degradation premise that Beck accommodates anxiety about mortality, the body, and all things related to it including sex. While he claims this anxiety is the root of the church’s dysfunctional treatment of difference, he never releases it himself.

None of the angst is necessary. We don’t have to be repulsed by what we are. We don’t have to flee this mortal coil or “refuse God full access to the world” (p. 156). We don’t have to fret about losing our tenuous status between angels and beasts of burden. For a religion built around remarkable stories of incarnation, I’d think we’d have a better handle on this than we do.

Fear, guilt, and shame all flow from an under-examined, unchallenged sense of corporeal inferiority. Not all of us aspire to be angels; some of us are satisfied with bearing the impress and image of God. Our station doesn’t need to be grasped and cannot be lost. Why is it such a scandal to be human? To what end do Christians keep drawing these boundaries around the light of the world and the salt in the soil, following Cotton Mather and Sigmund Freud in bowing to the primal fear of death and justifying the exclusion of the stranger? Beck never explores what could be possible were we to accept mortality rather than resist it, and embrace the body rather than cloak it in scandal. “The connection—soul and spirit with semen and sweat—is offensive,” Beck writes. That “offense” doesn’t compute for me, and the discomforts beneath it desperately need resolving.

These discomforts need resolving because we teach that God was so committed to the body that He came to live in one with all that the life cycle entails, and He wasn't diminished or degraded by doing so. Instead, participating in that life, we’re freed to embrace our own bodies and limits—even death loses its sting—and we’re also strengthened to embrace the bodies and limits of others. I entirely agree with Beck that the common Christian “flight from the ‘brass tacks’ of human existence is, at root, a form of denial.” And I noticed that Beck himself avoided several of the brass tacks in the Sex and Privy chapter!

Our denial is deep and it overshadows our dinners. How can we possibly experience “abundant life” unless we release it?

Keisha E. McKenzie, PhD, lives and works in the MD-DC Metro region, and writes at mackenzian.com.

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* LGBT+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other identities including intersex, queer, and asexual. Bisexual people are not “homosexual,” and transgender and intersex people may have any orientation, including "heterosexual."

As much as social group terms change over time (compare Negro > Afro-Caribbean > Black), it’s a painless expression of good will to use the most current consensus terminology for the people you’re referring to. When engaging specific individuals directly, use the terms that they use to describe themselves. Listen for their example and ask respectfully if you’re uncertain.

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Spectrum published articles by D. Stuart Letham and Col J. Gibson on ice cores and the lessons they might hold. We wish to respond to the original authors and to their discussants with observations directed not toward either of these two positions but to the assumptions that undergirded the discussion.

Article origins: On September 11, and again on September 28, Spectrum published articles by D. Stuart Letham and Col J. Gibson on ice cores and the lessons they might hold for Adventist understanding of the several perspectives on Creation held by members within the Church. Acknowledging that the present “official position” is probably Young-Earth Creationism they opted instead for a viewpoint that has been described as Old-Earth, Young Life Creationism, or as they phrased it, Old-Earth, Recent Creation. We wish to respond to the original authors and to their discussants with observations directed not toward either of these two positions but to the assumptions that undergirded the discussion.

Young-Earth Creationism (YEC) vs Old-Earth Young-Life Creationism (YLC).

We are struck by the pivotal role that the English word “earth” plays in this controversy and would observe at the outset that the participants appear to be assuming (as the lawyers would say) “facts not in evidence.” That is, the discussants on both sides of the question appear to be taking it for granted that:

When the underlying Hebrew word ’erets was translated the translator picked the correct English equivalent from the available possibilities of: “land” (far and away the most frequent choice by translators of the Hebrew Bible), “earth” (the second most frequent), “country,” “territory,” “world” and “ground” (chosen by translators much less often),
When the translators selected “earth” (for the Hebrew ’erets) they fully intended it to mean “Planet Earth” (not some lesser entity such as “land”), and that such an intention was legitimate. Few would pay any attention to a discussion pitting the Young-Land Creationist viewpoint against Old-Land, Young-Life creationist position.

We begin this exploration of Hebrew word meanings by identifying our position. We think that the original audience could not have conceived of “Planet Earth” for the straightforward reason that nobody could at that time and place. It would be more than 2,000 years into the future (after Copernicus and Galileo) before any listening audience interested in such matters would be able to conceive of a planet, such as Earth, circling the sun. In the discussion that follows (a slightly edited version of a handout provided to the studio audience participating in a recently video-taped presentation “Earth,” “Land” and Other Words; Why the Translation of ’erets Looms So Large, which can be accessed at ToBeginWithGod.com.), we enlist the aid of two imaginary characters because it helps in the complicated task of exploring what “they” thought then versus what “we” think now. Moshe is our imaginary, paradigmatic, early, Old Testament Hebrew. Moshe’s modern-day counterpart (also imaginary) is Ian Michael O’Dern (I’M odern).

One Word in Hebrew → Multiple Words in English

To Ian Michael the words, “earth, “world,” “land,” and “country” are quite different. With “earth” he almost certainly envisions a rotating sphere—Planet Earth—in relationship to other planets and the sun…all of them spheres. With “world” he may picture something similar. On the other hand, “land” and “country” are virtually never visually or conceptually attached to the solar system. They are not spherical nor do they rotate. These English words are clearly less imposing (less important?) and denote a much more limited reality.

There is, however, another aspect of “land” that Ian Michael readily recognizes in appropriate settings, but it may not come to mind when he when he reads the Bible. It is “land” that evokes a deep-seated, almost lyrical attachment to one’s roots, an attachment that is difficult to capture adequately in prose. It is this “land” that is the subject of poetry and song. This is the “land” of Sir Walter Scott in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, who wondered, “Breathes there a man with soul so dead / Who never to himself hath said / ‘This is my own, my native land”?’ For Francis Scott Key it is “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” For generations of American school children it is the “sweet land of liberty” of which they sing in the words of Samuel Francis Smith—the “land where my fathers died,” the “land of the pilgrims’ pride.” And for Woody Guthrie in the 1970s, “This land is my land, this land is your land.” Indeed, “this land was made for you and me.”

What the Translator Pictures Will Be What the Reader Gets

How can it be that the English words “earth” and “world,” “land” and country” words that produce such different images in our minds can all express the meaning of the same Hebrew word? As a translator works—“carrying across” the meaning of the source language (Hebrew) into the target language (English)—his/her mental picture of what is expressed in the source language will influence the choice of words in the target language. For this reason, whatever Ian Michael pictures when reading a Bible version in English is going to be similar to the picture the translator had upon reading the underlying Hebrew. Hopefully, ’erets, when translated, conveys the same mental picture that existed in the minds of the original author and his audience—Moshe and his kinsmen.

If the translator believed the original author and audience pictured Planet Earth coming into existence during a period of six Creation Days, or Planet Earth in the throes of a Flood of “Biblical proportions,” then he/she will render ’erets as “earth.” So, is “earth” the correct rendering of the Hebrew ’erets, or would it be better translated as “land”? The answer, of course, depends on what Moshe pictured when reading or hearing ’erets; thatis the way ’erets should be translated. The Genesis text was addressed to Moshe andit is his mental picture—his understanding (not the translator’s)—that ought to determine the meaning of the text.

The Meaning of “Earth” Has Changed Over Time

In Shakespeare’s England, which was also the England of the King James Version, “earth” most often meant dirt or soil and rarely, if ever, did it connote the entire “world” which by then was known to be spherical in shape (although the sun was still thought to travel around it). Today “earth” is virtually synonymous with Planet Earth circling the sun. This is so because lunar missions beginning in the 1950s have enabled Ian Michael to see his home planet as it appears when viewed from outer space. So for him, “earth” in a cosmological context such as Genesis 1, almost inevitably means Planet Earth. For Moshe that was impossible, for the obvious reason that for him the ’erets was fixed and certainly did not travel around the sun held in its orbit by gravity. On the contrary, ’erets could never be moved; God said so (1 Chronicles 16:30, Ps. 104:5).

’erets in Genesis and Some Very Interesting Statistics

From Creation to the end of Genesis chapter 11, the translators of the King James Version decided that 88% of the time (84/95) that 'erets meant “earth” In the rest of Genesis they decided that ’erets meant “land” 88% of the time (162/183). This is clearly not a random happening. This complete about-face from “earth” to “land” underscores the influence of translator judgment on what our Bible says.

“Earth” to Tyndale Meant Dirt, Soil, the Ground On Which We Live

Tyndale, laboring over the first English Old Testament translation directly from Hebrew (1530 CE) did not have our problem with the translation of ’erets, for in his day “earth’ could not have been taken for Planet Earth. At that time neither Tyndale nor anyone else knew that “earth” was a planet. For Tyndale the choice of “earth” or of “land” was a choice between words with very similar meanings. However, within a hundred years of Tyndale’s death, following the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, most well-read people in England and Europe understood “earth” (’erets) to be “Planet Earth.”

Before the Flood, Moshe was informed that God was going to “make it rain upon the land (’erets) for forty days and forty nights” and would “blot out every living thing ... from the face of the soil” (adamah) (Gen 7:4). On reading Genesis now, Ian Michael may well picture God promising to “...make it rain upon the entire planetary globe (’erets) for forty days and forty nights” and to “blot out all existing things ...from the face of the soil” (adamah).

After the Flood, Moshe understood that God had indeed “blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the soil (adamah)...They were blotted out from the land (’erets) (Genesis 7:23). For Ian Michael reading Genesis now, God “blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the soil (adamah)...They were blotted out from the planetary globe (’erets). Given that both of these texts link “face of the soil” (adamah) with ’erets, we are convinced that translating ’erets as “earth” is now linguistically in error. It is indeed misleading. A translation that invites the reader to link a “planetary globe” (’erets) with “the face of the soil” (adamah) is certainly incorrect (where “correct” is what Moshe would have understood by ’erets).

Conclusion

Has any mischief resulted from Tyndale’s innocent selection of “earth” as an English equivalent for the Hebrew ’erets; a selection that was perpetuated by the King James Version and has been reinforced by virtually every translator since? Absolutely! Because subsequent translators continued to use “earth” even though in the interim its meaning had changed to “Planet Earth,” the Bible has been accused of promulgating pseudo-science. Rendering ’erets as “earth” has lent credence to the mistaken—but widely accepted—notion that there is ongoing “warfare between science and religion.” It has also led to the idea that if the Flood was truly “global” in extent, then evidence of that Flood would still remain in sedimentary rock layers over the entire planet, the planet that Ian Michael envisions whenever he reads about the “earth” in Genesis. The validity of Flood geology thus rests on whether ’erets actually refers to Planet Earth or to what Moshe understood it to be—something on the order of “land” as in Moshe’s Promised Land, the Land of Israel ('erets Israel), the “land” that, in the beginning, God had created along with the “sky.” It is for that reason that our own translation of the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1, a translation we have designated the Original Hearers Version reads:

“To begin with, God created the sky and the land” Gen 1:1 (OHV). (For more, see: B. Bull, F. Guy, God, Sky and Land: Genesis 1 as the Ancient Hebrews Heard It. Adventist Forum, Roseville, California, page 33.)

Dr. Brian Bull is a professor of Pathology and Human Anatomy at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine. Dr. Fritz Guy is Ph.D. coordinator and professor of history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics and philosophy of time at La Sierra University. Bull and Guy have co-authored several books and papers on Genesis and Creation.

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In an attempt to respond to the cultural conversation on the LGBT community, the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary on the campus of Andrews University published a 21-page document showing just how unfit they are to contribute to the conversation. The document, An Understanding of the Biblical View on Homosexual Practice and Pastoral Care, lacks basic understanding of human sexuality as its authors conflate sex, gender, and sexuality.

But that’s just the tip of the titanic sized iceberg that sunk this document before it even left the Seminary’s harbor. The document took six months to develop by the Seminary Dean’s Council and Faculty. It included “input from Seminary town hall meetings, Andrews University administration, the Lake Union Conference, the North American Division of Seventh-day Adventists and the Biblical Research Institute.”

Frankly, it’s embarrassing that dozens of individuals with graduate level education wrote a document which lacks basic understanding on gender and sexuality. This isn’t a critique on their non-affirming theology of same-sex relationships (which was expected). This is commentary on the fact these authors with PhDs (and a JD) could not fill in as a substitute teacher on a single Gender and Sexuality 101 class.

In the opening paragraphs, the document purports to address “homosexuality, bisexuality, and the variety of transgender identities.” Except, sexuality and gender identity are two separate things. Moreover, nowhere in the document do they actually discuss trans issues. The word transgender is haphazardly thrown in to make sure they got all the letters in the LGBT acronym.

The document discusses “homosexual practice” which–I’m assuming–means same-sex sex. I’m not sure how to “practice” homosexuality and the document doesn’t elaborate. These language issues are small but important in illuminating the lack of fluency with which its authors discuss the LGBT community.

So, the context for this document is severely lacking – and so is the content.

The document has two sections: one on the official Seventh-day Adventist interpretation on six verses that describe same-sex sex. The second section offers a pastoral approach to LGBT people.

The first section simply regurgitates the go-to scriptural understanding of same-sex sex. There is nothing there besides the same positions the Seventh-day Adventist Church have propounded time and time again. The Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Adventist Theological Seminary have yet to engage, in any official capacity, interpretations that differ from their long-standing position. That is despite the fact there are pastors both working in the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventist and at the Seminary that hold (albeit secretly) affirming positions on same-sex relationships.

This section is redundant to the past conferences and resources that have been produced by Seventh-day Adventist official organizations. There are books that debunk this position (my favorite being “Bible, Gender, Sexuality” by James Brownson), so I won’t spend time doing so here.

A more interesting question is why the Andrews University felt the need to restate their position in the first place. The answer is simple: the cultural shifts in our church regarding the LGBT community has made them feel the need to respond. Yet, they have nothing new to share so the document repackages old content.

Case in point, the second section on pastoral care. This section doesn’t actually provide tangible examples of pastoral care. There are a lot of words but no actual content.

The entire section argues that pastors need to bring “behavioral change” to make LGBT people celibate, but be loving at the same time. There’s lots of talk of grace and love and sensitivity towards LGBT people. However, there are no tangible suggestions for how one practically does so. This is in part due to the fact that the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists hasn’t provided examples either. The Seminary can’t go and propose ideas that the GC hasn’t already provided.

For instance, the document says “we must also be sensitive to the reality of high rates of homelessness and suicide among gay youth.” It also discusses the bullying, hate crimes, and murders of LGBT people and encourages pastors to extend pastoral care. But, how exactly? If my time at Andrews University taught me anything it’s that even just listening to LGBT stories from LGBT students is scandalous. And LGBT students just this last year weren’t allowed to fund raise for LGBT homeless youth – a decision many in the Seminary co-signed.

Indeed, there were no practical examples of pastoral care besides encouragement to lead all people attracted to the same gender to lead a celibate life.

The lack of tangible examples of pastoral care points to the conflict in the Seventh-day Adventist church. Dozens upon dozens of former “ex-gay” leaders coming out and saying the practice not only doesn’t work but is harmful. Yet, it’s still not been fully condemned in the church as many Seventh-day Adventist leaders promote it. Even the document holds out hope for change despite reparative therapy being dangerous to LGBT people.

There is severe cognitive dissonance when the very rhetoric used in the first 15 pages condemning same-sex relationships is what drives many of the disparities the document admits LGBT people face. How is one supposed to address an epidemic – be it homelessness, bullying, or spiritual abuse – that they have caused in the first place?

The Andrews University Seminary is ill equipped to address the LGBT community themselves let alone be giving any advice.

Adventist Theological Seminary Statement on Homosexuality by Jared Wright (Spectrum Magazine)

Eliel Cruz is a speaker and writer on religion, (bi)sexuality, media, and culture at The Advocate, Mic, and Religion News Service. His work has also been published in the Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, Washington Post, Soujourners, DETAILS Magazine, Quartz, Rolling Stone, and various other international platforms.

He's the co-founder and former president of Intercollegiate Adventist Gay-Straight Alliance Coalition, an organization that advocates for safe spaces for LGBT students at Seventh-day Adventist colleges. He has a BBA & BA in International Business and French Studies from Andrews University. This article originally appeared on his website, ElielCruz.com, and is reprinted with permission.

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