@Sean Pitman: Re-wording a statement of belief that is already …

Comment on Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation by David Read.

@Sean Pitman: Re-wording a statement of belief that is already clear beyond cavil just makes us look impotent. Everyone understands what the Adventist position on origins is. Anyone who claims that the current statement allows room for theistic evolution is a liar, to put it bluntly. Fire them for lying or for being a Darwinist, but rewording the statement of belief will not help anything unless it is also accompanied by discipline.

David Read Also Commented

Changing the Wording of Adventist Fundamental Belief #6 on Creation
My opinion on this hasn’t changed in the last couple of years. It may be that some who were on the committee 30 years ago wanted to draft a statement of belief about creation with wiggle room, but they didn’t succeed. They were overruled by the Holy Spirit.

I recently had an online debate with Chuck Scriven about this, and he lost; he was not able to show me where there was any real ambiguity in the current phrasing. Only by reading words like “days” as non-literal—contrary to the Sabbath doctrine, the Spirit of Prophecy, and well known Adventist belief and history—can one find wiggle room. But that sort of misconstruction involves a level of dishonesty and moral turpitude that would itself preclude the misconstrue-er from being employed by the church.

Bill is right. If the church is unwilling to discipline unbelief and apostasy on the part of church employees now (and they are obviously and painfully unwilling to do so), then they will still be unwilling to discipline after the statement of belief is re-worded. It’s a pointless exercise.


Recent Comments by David Read

LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: I do not agree that science must be naturalistic, but if that is your bottom line, it will not trouble me much where it concerns most day-to-day science–the study of current, repeating phenomena. But a rigid naturalism applied to origins morphs into philosophical atheism. Hence, mainstream origins science is not science but atheistic apologetics. This is what should not be done at an Adventist school, but sadly what has been the rule at La Sierra.


Dr. Paul Cameron and the God of the Gaps
@Pauluc: The Adventist doctrine of creation is that God created the world in six days and rested on the Seventh day and hallowed it. (Gen. 2:2-3; Ex. 20:11) Do you believe that doctrine? It won’t do to say that you accept some vague “Christian doctrine of creation.” The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a very specific mission to call people back to the worship of the creator God, on the day that He hallowed at the creation.

You say you believe that the “core doctrine of Christianity is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ,” but what was Jesus Christ incarnated to do? Wasn’t his mission to redeem fallen humanity, to be the second Adam who succeeded where the first Adam failed? And doesn’t your view of origins make nonsense of a perfect creation, a literal Adam who fell, and the need for redemption because of Adam’s sin? You seem to want to gloss over all the very profound differences you have not only with Seventh-day Adventist dcotrine, but with the most basic reasons that Seventh-day Adventism exists.

The syncretistic hodgepodge religion you’ve created for yourself, combining elements of a biblical world view (the incarnation) and elements of a pagan worldview (a self-created creation) is not Adventism. It is anti-Seventh-day Adventism.


LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Holly Pham: Holly, I will try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.


LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: Since no creationist could land a job as chairman of a biology department at a public university, it seems entirely appropriate that no Darwinist should be given the chairmanship of a biology department of a Seventh-day Adventist college.

The SDA educational system doesn’t exist to expensively duplicate the public university system. It exists to provide a uniquely biblical and Seventh-day Adventist education to interested young people. If mainstream origins science is correct in its assumptions and conclusions about our origins, the entire enterprise of Seventh-day Adventism is an utterly foolish waste of time. So at Adventist institutions, our professors should assume that Darwinistic science is false, and that creationistic science is true (just the reverse of how it is done at public universities), and proceed accordingly.


LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@gene fortner: What I like about your list of topics, Gene, is that it points out that many disciplines are implicated in the necessary change of worldview. It isn’t just biology and geology, although those are the main ones. History, archeology, anthropology and other disciplines should also be approached from a biblical worldview. The biblical worldview should pervade the entire curriculum.