The Good, the Not So Good, and the Perplexing
by Andy Hanson, April 8, 2015: Reader, I have long been a collector of magazines published independently by members of the Adventist Church. The following pdf file is from Adventist Currents,* Volume One, Numbers 3 & 4, August, 1990. It is a review of the 55th General Conference Session, and contains the following disclaimer: The sources of this article—nominating committee members and regular delegates in both public and private debriefings—are not credited in order to protect both the guilty and the innocent and to multiply the joy of speculation.
I believe you will find the 16 pages as fascinating as I have. More issues of Adventist Currents can be made available if there is sufficient interest.
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* “The first issue of Adventist Currents appeared in July 1983. The magazine was published independently by members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America, specifically, by Mars Hill Publications, Inc. in Loma Linda, California. It was a response to the controversial dismissal of Seventh-day Adventist theologian Desmond Ford in 1980.
“Perhaps its most commonly cited article is ‘Currents Interview: Walter Martin’ by Douglas Hackleman, Adventist Currents 1:1 (July 1983), p. 15. Walter Martin was an evangelical who had much to do with the Adventist church’s increasing acceptance as a valid Christian denomination, which is also related to the production of Questions on Doctrine.
“Another significant article was by Molleurus Couperus, ‘The Significance of Ellen White’s Head Injury’ Adventist Currents 1:6 (June 1985), p. 31. In this article Couperus, an Adventist physician, controversially suggested that church co-founder Ellen G. White‘s visions were due to temporal lobe epilepsy. Another physician, Donald Peterson, has responded in ‘Visions or Seizures: Was Ellen White the Victim of Epilepsy?’, which is published on the official Ellen G. White Estate website.
“Volume 1 spanned 1983 to 1985 and contained 6 issues. Volume 2 spanned 1985 to 1987 with 4 issues. The final issue was Volume 3:1 published in April 1988. Several issues of a newsletter were published in 1990.
“It has been claimed that the magazine Adventist Today filled the void left by Adventist Currents when it ceased publication.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventist_Currents/
Andy,
It seems that no matter what the point of controversy, someone in the Adventist Church will begin publishing their criticisms of individuals and topics. The Internet has to a large degree replaced the printed page as the delivery vehicle because it makes the voices of the critics more readily available. Adding a slick web page gives the image of credibility. But issues come and issues go and I’ve seen enough of them come and go in my lifetime that I don’t get alarmed like I used to. The issues shall pass, but God endures forever.
There is always the Review and Union paper to inform us of what we should think and do: Be sure and do not read non-SdA literature or listen to such preachers.
When I did read them years ago, I knew what the church organs didn’t say was the stuff was of real importance.
Right! It took the big city papers like the WashingtonPost and L.A.Times to break the stories of Davenport and Folkenberg’s real estate deals with a former convict.
Now, the Florida newspapers are reporting on another Adventist Hospital in the Orlando area, it’s cost and additional information supplied by others following this announcement, of the humungous perks for Adventist Health Systems administrators.
I believe that it is correct to say that it was Adventist Today which first broke the story about the size of the salary, benefits, and other perks of certain administrators at a well-known Adventist medical center.
Doing a Feature on factual information that is readily available to the public isn’t exactly breaking a story. Using data to weave a narrative may well be a useful undertaking. The size of salaries, benefits, and other perks for administrators at “a well known Adventist medical center” is actually significantly below that of administrators at other lesser known (at least to the writer of that article) Adventist medical centers. And a perspective totally overlooked by the article was that the size of slaries, benefits, and other perks of executives, managers, nurses, physicians, allied health professionals, and housekeepers are all relatively in line with those of other similarly situated medical centers. The takeaway for me – not really newsworthy -was that tenured Adventist intellectuals are just as subject to greed and envy as the rest of humanity.
My point is not to rehash the implications of those fine articles, but to point out that even journalists see reality selectively, and often do analysis through biases which they fail to acknowledge. Yes, of course, we need an independent Adventist press. But the importance of that undertaking should not lead to self-anointing or moral arrogance.
What we who are more liberal see as important news or perspectives isn’t necessarily being “suppressed” by the Adventist MSM. We just use different filters for determining what is newsworthy. Too often it feels to me like the investment Adventist liberals make in their perspectives leads to denigration and intolerant attitudes toward that which nourishes, protects, and sustains more tradition minded-Adventists.
Wasn’t Folkenberg a liberal?
“Wasn’t Folkenberg a liberal?” Obviously, No!
The independent press and now the internet are crucial to getting the information to the masses who are otherwise inundated with endless propaganda from institutions (including churches) and corporations who want to push their agenda. We are fortunate to live in an age when this is recognized as a vital part of democracy. Unfortunately it is not that way in all parts of the world. There was an interesting post by a Russian man who is now a US resident who went back and only watched Russian TV and Newspapers to see if it changed his outlook and by one month he says he could totally understand why most Russians think the US and west in general are evil conspirators. Unless you get the real story, you go with what you are told.
Please publish some more of the Adventist Currents. This one was extremely interesting to me. The inner workings of the committees at the GC Sessions are something each of us should know.
It’s amazing how God uses this fallible, weak body of believers, to maintain His church on earth. In spite of their mistakes, this church continues on.
So Andy, who wrote that incisive and revealing article? Do any of our founding Adventist Today patriarchs who migrated from Adventist Currents to Adventist Today, want to reveal it to us? And can we get him/her to do the same for the 2015 GC session?
How welcome to have real investigative journalism instead of PR-Polished-Pablum we get from the in-the-GC-pocket-Review now. The only sad thing in the article was hanging so much hope on poor Folkenberg… Our hopes betray us often.
AT is committed to reporting the up-and-coming GC in the spirit of “real investigative journalism.” Hold us to that promise.
The basic controversy in Adventism began with QOD and his intensified ever since then. The real problem was and is playing off one aspect of truth against another. So it is gospel against law, and law against gospel. The contrast is misrepresented and the parallel is misrepresented. And all we have is basic confusion on both counts with each side defending their particular point in contrast to the other. In doing so, truth is wrested from its biblical perspective and neither side really defends the true bible presentation of either law or gospel. Who wins? The devil wins.
In the April issue of Adventist world there is an article about sin and forgiveness and on page 37 the author states what he perceives is the mind of God in these words,
“Yes, your sins are forgiven, and I choose to remember no more what took place in your past. Your sins have been erased, and you may no longer find them, because they have been caste into the depths of the sea.”
He states and implies that sin is blotted out at the moment of forgiveness and convolutes the historical process of probation and the final blotting out of sin at the end of the judgment. Forgiveness is not the blotting out of sin. As EGW has well said, “Pardon is written against our name but the sin stands on record until the IJ.”
Yet this article is published in our “World” magazine and is advocated as the true and viable presentation of what SDA’s believe and teach about sin and salvation.
For at least some of us, it is a disgrace to bible Adventism as well as our pioneers and ultimately to Jesus who has given end time enlightenment to our pioneers and recorded by His servant EGW for our evaluation and edification.
The article undermines the issue of probation and the historical process and presents a type of “once saved, always saved” spirituality that is foreign to the bible and true bible Adventism.
God’s promise to “remember our sins no more” comes at the end of the judgment. Until then, we are still on probation with the real possibility that God will certainly “remember our sins” if we are not faithful until the end. And this warning keeps us from presumption and a false application of the gospel that is not biblical.
Of course we can claim forgiveness and if we continue in the faith look forward with adequate assurance of final vindication. But it is pure presumption to claim we are no longer on trial concerning any sins we have committed in the past. It is both a false presentation of the law and gospel and without excuse in light of the ongoing discussions and agitation in the church when we have a clear biblical presentation by EGW in the Great Controversy.
And they wonder why more and more church members no longer trust an ignorant and perhaps rebellious leadership that undermines basic SDA doctrine with articles like this one so foreign to our bible message.
There will be no reconciliation as long as bible truth is denied and advocated by an…