Twenty-Eight Is Twenty-Seven Too Many
by Mark Johnson | 11 June 2024 |
Our church is trapped in a happy-place time-warp bubble.
Happy places are dreamlands, wonderlands, sanctuaries of peace and pleasure. Thinking about them makes you feel cheerful and contented. They’re usually located inside your head.
Time warps are imaginary distortions of space and time. In theory, they allow people to be transported into the past or into the future.
And living in a bubble insulates you from the pain of reality. This may be done by limiting your contacts to only those who tell you what you want to hear. You may also enclose yourself in a bubble by surrounding yourself with things that convince you that you are wonderful, and all is well.
There’s an important point to note here.
These are imaginary. They do not represent the truth. They are not real.
Traditional happy places
Adventist happy places often revolve around foreign missions. They are usually reminiscent of life in the 1950s and early ‘60s. And they are carefully wrapped in bubbles.
Adventist missions in the 1950s and early 60s were like little bits of heaven on earth. In many developing countries Adventists had the finest hospitals and the best schools. Our facilities were famous for their beautiful, well-groomed landscapes. In those happy places there was steady growth in church membership. Our prophetic interpretations were persuasive, our biblical understanding impressive, and our Adventist way of life convincing. No other denomination had the sanctified mix of humility and hubris that we had.
We may have been called a cult by some, but we were a smug and self-righteous cult. For we knew we had the truth.
But the pure goodness of these Adventist mission happy places exists only in our flawed or failing memories. Happy places hide the dark side of life. The reality of our missions was a bit shady.
We lived in safe, sheltered compounds with high rock walls embedded with broken glass on the top. We hired local guards, and cooks, and nannies, and drivers, and gardeners, but Americans and Europeans ran the mission work—especially the finances. The new converts often moved in (joined the church), up (were educated in our institutions), and out (then they left again).
Long mission terms with multiple households living in close quarters not infrequently led to personal conflicts, moral misconduct, and shattered families. The church’s reputation with local governments was sometimes tarnished by legal problems relating to such things as smuggling and money-laundering.
But we were doing such good work! And with such limited resources!
Modern happy places
There are still some Adventist happy places in the world today. We can escape to them to get away from the threat of women’s ordination, our fears of associating with LGBTQ individuals, or our concerns regarding reproductive rights and abortion. They help camouflage the concerns around the growing scientific evidence that the age of the earth is older than six or seven thousand years. They mask the fact that history includes dinosaurs. They shield us from the proven claims of prophetic plagiarism.
Despite all our problems, even the declining attendance in our American and European churches, schools, and universities, these happy places still help us feel successful.
While we’re there. South America, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific all have enclaves that remind us of the achievements of Adventism in the 1950s. There are even a few Adventist ghettos left in North America and Western Europe where the bubbles seem to be holding back the problems of today.
We brought many of these problems on ourselves. We taught that truth was progressive, without realizing some might try to present new truth. We felt the church was strong enough to handle some change. We foolishly told each believer they were a priest. We led members to believe that their interpretations of biblical passages were worth exploring. We even suggested that questioning authority might be acceptable, to a point.
Protecting the truth
That was lunacy! How can a hierarchical church expect to hold things together if individual members are searching for truth on their own? The creed must be protected!
But we don’t formally have a creed. Our church founders didn’t like creeds. Most were vehemently anti-creedal. They felt creeds calcified thought. They blocked the ongoing search for truth. They stifled the work of the Holy Spirit.
We may not like creeds, but we want rules. We focus on the “Keep My commandments.” We seem to overlook “Follow Me.”
So we reverently appropriated the Bible as our creed. This led to a serious creedal conundrum. The Bible is too broad to be a practical, workable creed, and yet we couldn’t afford to have lay believers finding truth on their own. They came up with all sorts of amazing facts and heretical interpretations. So, we officially settled on a list of 28 Fundamental Beliefs.
We contend that this list is not a creed, but by all common definitions, it is. It’s also a comfortable and comforting bubble.
We dogmatically defend all 28 of these beliefs. Even those who were baptized into the church long before they were adopted are expected to support them unquestioningly. But they’re difficult to handle. They’re not uniform. Some of them are theological, some are doctrinal, some are inspirational, and some are aspirational.
Yet to deny faith in any one of them is reason for church discipline. In fact, the very first reason listed for discipline in our Church Manual is the denying or undercutting of our Fundamental Beliefs. Perhaps the causes for discipline are not listed by priority, but they are itemized in a way that gives the appearance that denying any of the Fundamental Beliefs is worse in the sight of the organized church than murder, fornication, physical abuse, business fraud, or any of the many other destructive activities that come later in the list.
Perhaps our beliefs have indeed calcified our thinking.
Interestingly, our founding prophet encouraged us to have a creed. She even told us what it should be.
“The prayer of Christ to his Father, contained in the seventeenth chapter of John, is to be our church creed” (Selected Messages, Vol. 3, p. 21).
The overarching theme of the seventeenth chapter of John is very simple: God is good. Christ states that He has finished the work He was sent here to do. He has revealed God’s character to His intelligent creatures. He has demonstrated to the universe the unwavering goodness of God.
God is good.
That’s it. That’s the creed, the truth. It’s the basis of the one and only truly fundamental biblical belief. Everything else is secondary.
In fact, a list of multiple fundamental beliefs is oxymoronic. Fundamental means the one most basic thing. It’s singular. Any other valid moral, ethical, or theological principle, belief, or doctrine stems from, points to, explains, magnifies, builds on, or summarizes the facets of this one fundamental belief. There may be ten, or 28, or 613, or an infinite number of ways to describe it, or demonstrate it, but it stands alone.
God is good.
This implies that everything God has done, is doing, and will do in the future is the right thing to do, the loving thing, the merciful thing, the kind thing, and the just thing. It says His character is always and forever righteous. It states that the emergency measures He has taken in His battle against sin are just, although they may confuse us at times.
One cannot overestimate or exaggerate God’s goodness. It’s the non-imaginary bubble surrounding reality. It’s independent of time. It’s the one genuinely happy place.
It’s all that really matters. If it’s not true, salvation is a cruel joke. If God is not good, we might as well eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we will die a hopeless death or face a terrible future. To be “saved” by a God who is not good would be eternal torture.
It was misunderstanding and distrusting the goodness of God that separated us from Him in the first place. It’s recognizing it that draws us back again (Luke 15; Romans 2:4). It’s the point on which His greatest enemy has aimed his most subtle, malicious, and successful attacks.
I know that many intelligent, well-meaning, and loving individuals worked very hard to produce our Fundamental Beliefs. But I wonder if each belief adequately reflects and magnifies the goodness of God.
- As one reads them, does the picture of the true character of God become clearer?
- Do they paint God’s goodness as His greatest quality?
- Do they invite us to befriend Him?
- Do they motivate us to want to “do right because it is right – because right doing is pleasing to God?” (Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 97).
- Do they teach us how His goodness might influence our relationships with others?
- Do they suggest good ways that we might better approach today’s complex and thorny issues?
Or do they just reinforce the ephemeral bubbles surrounding our time-warped and imaginary happy places?
Mark B. Johnson is a graduate of Pacific Union College and Loma Linda University, with a medical residency at Johns Hopkins University in Preventive Medicine and Public Health. He is the local public health officer in the Denver metropolitan region. He’s an adult Sabbath School class teacher and church board chair at the Boulder Adventist church.
