The Reformation was a milestone in Christian history. Adventists embrace Martin Luther as one of the great reformers, but we have only adopted some of his teachings. More than 500 years later we are still not finished with the Reformation.
Text by Pastor Henk van der Kamp
People often ask Jesus: ‘What do I need to do to be given eternal life?’ (See Matthew 19:16 and Luke 10:25, for example.) The emphasis seems to be on the words ‘I’ and ‘do’. Martin Luther applied these texts to himself. ‘Which good works should I do to become acceptable in God’s eyes?’ Or more rigorously: ‘Which meritorious works will motivate a wrathful God to accept me as his child?’ No matter how long Luther looked at his good works, he could find nothing that was good enough. He saw himself as a law-breaker and a sinner. He became distraught.
Grace
In the end Luther came to the conclusion that there was no work good enough to force God’s grace. Fresh study of the Bible, and especially of the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, convinced Luther that God’s favour could not be bought through ‘works or law’. It could only come through faith (Romans 4:1-5). Luther (re)discovered that justification was a loving act of God, freely given to humankind through the atoning power of Christ’s crucifixion. By confessing their faith human beings could be declared innocent, their sins taken away by Christ’s sacrifice.
Saved but Sinful
Luther and Calvin (the latter in greater measure) drew a sharp line between what God does for people and what people do for God. The gospel is based entirely on what God does to mediate the effects of sin for humankind. Nothing a person does ultimately makes a difference. Nothing in creation can save itself—not even by following the letter of the law. Only God can save, through Christ.
Each positive response given by humankind is motivated by their love of God, but this response always remains flawed. This is why Luther and Calvin kept the ‘answer’ of good works strictly separate from justification. It received its own name: ‘sanctification’. For Luther, humankind is both completely redeemed and cursed by sin; perfection here on earth is unreachable.
The question is, do we as Adventists accept this interpretation of the gospel?
Gaps in Reasoning
The Advent movement has grown from the ‘little flock’ of 1850 into a faith community with more than twenty million members. This growth means we cannot isolate ourselves; questions about our relationship to other Christian communities will keep on coming, from both inside and outside the church. Adventists see the reformers of the 16th century as spiritual ancestors— especially in our critical attitude to Rome’s ‘mother church’—but we do not accept everything the reformers learned.
Put bluntly, Adventism argues that to continue the Reformation, we need to fill the gaps Luther left open. One gap in the reasoning of the reformers has even been made into our spearhead: the restoration of the Sabbath. Of course, the Sabbath alone is not the gospel; it is inextricably linked to the law. We must therefore look at the heart of the reformers’ message, and judge it for its contents.
As an example, let us look at two moments in our history where we were ‘forced’ to reconsider our relationship to Reformation teachings: the General Conference of 1888 and the Robert Brinsmead crisis. In each of these moments we spoke as followers of the Reformation, but also not. As a matter of fact, we spoke more about the consequences of the reformatory doctrine on our vision of the Sabbath commandment, focusing on the question: Is there merit in keeping the Sabbath? The was reinforced by the principle that ‘whoever fails in one commandment, fails in all …’ (see James 2:10). Can anyone who consciously denies the Sabbath be saved?
Oversimplification
It was not unusual to be told that disobedient believers couldn’t count on salvation—especially in the groups that tended to oversimplify things. After all, people reasoned, to being a real Christian was serious business. Some of us still think that the Reformers tried to overturn the Sabbath commandment by talking about an all-encompassing ‘law of love’, by which every Christian will be tested. At the back of our minds we remember that literal compliance with the entire Torah was declared unnecessary at the Council of Jerusalem (see Acts 15). How did early Adventists talk about this 130 years ago?
The Whole Law
In his commentary on the letter to the Galatians, Luther describes ‘the law’ as the whole law—the whole Torah (Galatians 5:14). He concludes that the authority of the whole law has been undermined by Christ (Galatians 3:24-26).
Adventism used the language of the reformers, but not the content behind it.
From early on, Adventists have felt that as soon as the whole law loses its legal authority, the Sabbath commandment becomes difficult to defend. The typical solution was to divide the laws of Moses into three categories: moral, ceremonial, and civil. If the authority of the law had been undermined, it only really applied to the ceremonial laws, we reasoned. The ten commandments were still authoritative, and with them the Sabbath commandment.
Visions
In 1854, Adventists leaders J.H. Waggoner and S. Pierce had a heated debate about what was meant by ‘the law’ in Galatians. Pierce insisted that the law in Galatians only involved the unnecessary ceremonial law, but Wagoner believed that Paul’s argument was also applicable to the ten commandments—with all the consequences for our view on the Sabbath. The brothers could not agree, until God gave Ellen White a vision showing that Paul rejected the ceremonial law, but not the ten commandments. With this Luther, and an essential part of his gospel interpretation, was disregarded.
The Same Question
In 1888 the same question reared its head, this time at a General Conference session. E.J. Waggoner (son of J.H. Waggoner) proposed a vision of the gospel that closely resembled Luther’s. He supported Luther’s view of the whole law in Galatians. This time Ellen White approved of the interpretation, to the dismay of many church leaders. Later Uriah Smith, a very authoritative Adventist in those days, would write to blame Ellen White for changing her mind so suddenly and without reason, effectively undoing what she had seen in vision.
At a later point in her life, Ellen White would write these highly-cited words in the Review & Herald: ‘The righteousness by which we are justified is imputed; the righteousness by which we are sanctified is imparted. The first is our title to heaven, the second is our fitness for heaven’ (4 June 1895). Here Ellen White combines the concepts of justification and sanctification, and makes them dependent on each other. Luther and Calvin would never have formulated these two concepts in this way. The question remains: At what point does a life of holiness become enough to establish our justification? This was discussed heatedly in another round.
Perfect Obedience
Between 1959 and 1970, Australian Robert Brinsmead sought an impossible, twisted path to perfect obedience in the end times. Like Luther, Brinsmead was frustrated by the sin that tainted all his good intentions. If that was true in everyday life, he reasoned, how would things be in the end times, when Jesus left the sanctuary, giving up his role as a mediator, to make the long journey to Earth? During this journey God’s children would be persecuted and defiled (see The Great Controversy, Chapter 39). They would also be left without a mediator— that was Brinsmead’s main problem. No one would be able to sin during this period, and whoever did would be lost. In addition, the last battle would be for the universal recognition of the Sabbath.
Extremist
Brinsmead was a radicalist, and a charismatic extreminst of high integrity. The period just before the second coming was his theological flagship. He argued that believers needed to remain ‘perfect’ in this period, which could not be achieved through good works or careful Sabbath worship alone. There was only one solution: perfection had to be a gift from God, in the same way as justification. All that human work and worry would not bring about perfection. Brinsmead offered a wonderful solution for living perfectly without a mediator in the end times, but the leadership rejected this solution as anti-perfectionistic (from a human perspective), and thus un-Adventist. There should be no talk that ‘God must give us something’—it’s the believer who must perform!
Word Choice and Content
Brinsmead needed more than a decade to come to terms with his theories, and he had clearly bitten off more than he could chew. After these ten years he had completely changed course. In 1971 he studied the gospel theology of Luther and Calvin, and concluded that Adventism used the language of the reformers, but not the content behind it. He was as radical in this second period as he was in the first. Eventually, following Luther and Calvin to the letter on gospel and law, Brinsmead saw no need for the Sabbath.
The Roman Catholic Gospel
Something else came out of Brinsmead’s ‘second period’ as well. He stated that, in the end times, ‘human justification’ will differ from the ‘justification of God’. The gospels teach about the salvation of humankind, but it seems as though everything in Adventist teachings (and about the final stages of the history of redemption) is about the salvation of God and his law. We, the true Remnant, will prove that God’s law is perfect, unmasking Satan’s lies about the implacability of God’s law. For Brinsmead, this was precisely the opposite of the what reformers found in the gospel. Think about it: if people can follow the law perfectly in the end times, why have they not been doing so in previous centuries? What use is Christ if you can live a perfect life without him? For Brinsmead, this vision of the end times fits better with the Roman Catholic gospel than the Protestant one.
500 Years of Reformation
Hard to hear, isn’t it? But does Brinsmead have a point? Looking back at our development, Adventists clearly have a great appreciation for what the reformers did, but we have only partly accepted their reformed rewording of the gospel and the law. In today’s Adventism, we can read texts that almost sound Lutheran. Just look at the fourth lesson in this year’s third Sabbath School quarterly. But there are also many books from a very different corner of the church, which take justification ‘through faith alone’ and link it back to independent works and sanctification.
After 500 years of Reformation, we are still not done reforming…
Pastor Henk van der Kamp is a retired pastor of the Adventist church.
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