Our Controversy Over The Great Controversy, Part 3: Postmodernism’s Concern for Meaning
by Jim Walters | 4 July 2024 |
Pre-modern believers honestly believe God directly revealed to them final knowledge of sin’s origin and end, as I said in part one of this series. Modern Adventists reason that stories like TGC were written by fallible believers who did their honest best but may have been wrong—per part two.
Postmodern Adventists take it a step further. Postmodern Adventists can accept the limitations of The Great Controversy (TGC), but see these stories as necessary metaphors for grappling with the profound conflict between good and evil.
Can a person be a “good” Seventh-day Adventist and disagree with this grounding story? Yes, some widely read, philosophical church members may respect this historic teaching, yet see it as finally inadequate. But this line of reasoning, as important as it is, is not the issue right here. I can address that another time.
The point is that we Adventists don’t need to prove our TGC story; we accept it as an existentially orienting narrative whose roots lie deep within our Judeo-Christian heritage (Isa. 14:12-17; 1 Cor. 13:13; Col. 1:5; 1 Thes. 1:3).
I’m reminded of the moving 18th-century anthem, Be Still, My Soul: “Be still, my soul, the Lord is on thy side.” The final triumph of Good over Evil is the crying hope of our whole being, not just an exercise of mind. The Lord is on our side, and that is our grounding metaphor of meaning and hope.
Loma Linda University Church series
Pastor Randy Roberts, longtime senior pastor at the Loma Linda University Church and arguably the denomination’s leading public voice, preached a seven-sermon series on the book of Revelation last summer, entitled “Heaven Cares: the Tender God of the Apocalypse.” Roberts boldly announced that he’d primarily be taking an “idealist” approach, in contrast to three other options he cited:
- Futurism: the book’s predominant prophecies are yet to come.
- Historicism: a prediction of literal historical events.
- Preterism: the book relates to the past, namely the Roman empire.
I cite Roberts’ “Heaven Cares” series as an example of applied postmodernism. He soars above the traditional Adventist/evangelical premodern war of words. He refuses to get lost in the weeds of Ellen White’s sources. Instead, he contends that Revelation portrays ideas that apply to all times and all people.
Accordingly, Roberts avoids many of Adventism’s favorite ideas—and when he touches key historical themes, he gives them a new twist.
Postmodern redefinitions
- The 144,000: Roberts acknowledges this as a “contested” idea. He alludes to the Revelation 7:4, but immediately cites 7:9 as an explanation: “And…behold a great multitude…crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne.’”
- Rev. 12:17: “Then the dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the remnant of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus.” Roberts refers to the dragon leaving the scene, saying nothing about the last half of the verse.
- Armageddon: Revelation portrays divergent camps in this battle. Roberts says it’s not a literal battle, but one “fought in our minds.” It’s a battle “for loyalty of mind and heart.”
- The close of probation scared Roberts as he was growing up. He explains that the phrase essentially indicates a time when people make their decision, and they don’t change.
- God’s wrath: It’s when God steps back and allows the devil to have full reign.
- God’s judgment on evildoers: It’s not undesirable—it’s when evildoers such as Hitler get their just reward.
- What ultimately defeats Satan? The truth—the truth about God, about God’s character, about God’s plan of salvation. “That’s the tender God of the apocalypse,” Roberts says.
The postmodern audience
No doubt Roberts knows, even if he didn’t consciously bear it in mind, that many of his congregants are broadly read. They are at least generally aware of the giant leap forward in contemporary knowledge. For example:
- The dominant astronomical view of the cosmos in 1924 was that the Milky Way is the entire universe. Today’s universe includes an estimated 200 billion galaxies, and 100 billion-trillion stars.
- Human reason rules one’s life (old view); one’s inner visceral self, which is largely emotion, plays the dominant role.[1]
- Space—and perhaps even time—may be less fundamental than previously thought. Spacetime may be “emergent,” coming from quantum gravity, say leading astrophysicists.[2]
Roberts’s approach to cosmic conflict in Revelation is significantly postmodern, in both its Adventism and its resonance with today’s dominant thought patterns. He is, ironically, in league with both the Adventist past and the Adventist cutting-edge. He embraces the old notion of our church as a “movement,” of truth as “present.” That earlier Adventist thinkers never dreamed that a Randy Roberts would move in the direction he has, to make Revelation present, is of interest, but it’s secondary. Taking the old and making it new—that’s a postmodern play, and some would say that’s the way faithful Christian thinkers have always worked.
Similar cutting-edge thinkers
John D. Caputo, a Roman Catholic professor, gave a presentation at Brigham Young University entitled “Post Modern, Post Secular, Post Religious.” Caputo questions our longtime obsession with rational proofs that God “exists,” seeing theology as not so much talk about God as to God.
David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox biblical scholar, recently published Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on Christian Belief. Hart contrasts rational, fixed, doctrinal propositions with dynamic orientations of “reflection, desire, and imagination.”[3] For Hart the apocalypse is the final reconciliation and realization of all things into God; it’s the culmination of the gospel. “The gospel is nothing if it’s not apocalyptic.”[4]
Ann Taves, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, devotes a chapter in Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James,[5] to “Clairvoyants and Visionaries,” in which she sympathetically examines the visionary role that Ellen Harmon White played among the New England “radical adventists” of the 1840s. In good postmodern style, she embraces the excitable Ellen Harmon as illustrating how the religious and natural spheres overlap.
Pastor Roberts closes his postmodern series on Revelation, the book of the Bible that dominates TGC, by quoting the book’s famous last words:
“The great controversy is ended. Sin and sinners are no more…From the minutest atom to the greatest world, all things, animate and inanimate, in their unshadowed beauty and perfect joy, declare that God is love.”[6]
- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (Pantheon Books, 2012). ↑
- Adam Becker, “What Is Spacetime Really Made Of?” (Scientific American, February 1, 2022). ↑
- David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on Christian Belief (Ada, MI: Baker Academic, 1922), p. 247. ↑
- Ibid., p. 131. ↑
- Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). ↑
- Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1950), pp. 677, 678. ↑
James W. Walters is professor emeritus of ethics at Loma Linda University.
