An Open Letter to the Leadership of the Seventh-day Adventist Church

This is an Open Letter to Elders Bradford Newton and Erton Köhler, Presidents of the Pacific Union and General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

This letter is in regard to an article published in the most recent Pacific Union Recorder by the Editor Alberto Valenzuela, promoting the Darwinian story of origins as being superior to the Biblical account of a literal Creation Week and a literal worldwide Noachian Flood. Valenzuela’s article, entitled “Honoring God Through Science and Scripture” (Link, Link) strikes at the very heart of what the SDA Church regards as “Fundamental” to the Gospel Message of Hope that we are responsible to spread throughout the World before the Second Coming of Jesus to take us all Home.

Several church leaders contacted me, asking me to write a response to this article, which I published on February 13th (Link). Several other pastors and religious liberty attorneys have also published their concerns in public forums (Link, Link, Link, Link, Link). It has been almost two weeks now, and still, there has been no official response from the Pacific Union Leadership. The online links published on the Union’s website (noted above) and Facebook page to Valenzuela’s article remain active (both Spanish and English versions), and no retraction or apology has been issued to the wide readership of the Recorder (a distribution of around 76,000).

Something should have been done about this before now. It may be true that Valenzuela published this on his own, as the Editor of the Recorder, without the permission or oversight of the Union Leadership. However, the lack of response from the leadership of the Union ends up being viewed as tacit support for what was published against the Fundamentals of the Church – similar to the open and brazen promotion of Darwinian evolution at La Sierra University some 15 years ago. The culpability here is now much larger – well beyond Valenzuela and his theistic evolutionary views on origins. Letting this simply pass in silence only makes things worse. It suggests that an entire Union of the SDA Church is in open opposition to the stated fundamental goals and mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church at large. It supports a very harmful division within the Church and makes it appear to those on the outside that we are not united on a very key issue – an issue upon which our very name is based. We should be forming a united spearhead on this, not taking a tentative backseat on a topic that strikes at the heart of Biblical credibility and the rational basis for the very reason for the Hope that we have been given.