Ron: Here’s an actual quote from Great Controversy: “The great deceiver has …

Comment on A little-known history about Belief 6 by David Read.

Ron:

Here’s an actual quote from Great Controversy:

“The great deceiver has many agents ready to present any and every kind of error to ensnare souls–heresies prepared to suit the varied tastes and capacities of those whom he would ruin. It is his plan to bring into the church insincere, unregenerate elements that will encourage doubt and unbelief, and hinder all who desire to see the work of God advance and to advance with it. Many who have no real faith in God or in His word assent to some principles of truth and pass as Christians, and thus they are enabled to introduce their errors as Scriptural doctrines.”

“The position that it is of no consequence what men believe is one of Satan’s most successful deceptions. He knows that the truth, received in the love of it, sanctifies the soul of the receiver; therefore he is constantly seeking to substitute false theories, fables, another gospel. From the beginning the servants of God have contended against false teachers, not merely as vicious men, but as inculcators of falsehoods that were fatal to the soul. Elijah, Jeremiah, Paul, firmly and fearlessly opposed those who were turning men from the word of God. That liberality which regards a correct religious faith as unimportant found no favor with these holy defenders of the truth.”

Ellen White, Great Controversy, Ch. 32, p. 520.

David Read Also Commented

A little-known history about Belief 6
Faith, thanks very much for taking the time to deconstruct Ron’s ramblings on a sentence-by-sentence basis. He is so emotion-based and anti-logical that I wouldn’t have bothered, but I appreciate that you took the time.

For me the significance of people like Ron is that lax discipline and an adoctrinal (or even anti-doctrinal) “Adventism” have prevailed for so long in certain parts of the country that he thinks that for us to now insist that Adventist doctrines be upheld in Adventist institutions is to unfairly change the rules in the middle of the game. And in a sense he is right. But every significant work of reform consists of just such changes, because the old way of doing things was wrong and needed to be changed. The way things were in the time of the Judges is the way things are in some Adventist conferences today: everyone does what is right in his own eyes.

That has to stop. Now.


A little-known history about Belief 6
Ron’s observations are all valid given his conception of what the church is: a social club completely denatured of all doctrinal content. If it doesn’t matter what SDA members believe, then gross doctrinal unorthodoxy cannot be grounds for firing and/or disfellowshipping. And since doctrine or belief systems are utterly and completely irrelevant for current SDA members, why should it matter what potential new members believe, if anything? Why should it matter if they have repented or are in any sense converted?

To those of us who believe that the church not only has doctrines, but is effectively defined as a community of commonly shared beliefs, then Ron’s basic point of view, and the opinions naturally flowing therefrom, do not make any sense at all. They are utterly bizarre. In fact, Ron’s ecclesiology is so radically different than mine, that that fact alone, without more, would necessarily put us in different denominations.


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.