The Seventh-day Adventist Church, which brought into existence this college [Southern Missionary College] along with scores of others, has reached the dangerous period of middle age. In 140 short years we have moved from meetings held in kitchens, tents, and barns to a listing in Standard and Poor's and an estimated accumulation (1979) of 4 billion dollars in assets! The great danger is that we forget the message and mission that gave us birth and follow the path of virtually every other major Protestant body before us, into the compromise of our primitive faith in the supreme authority of the Scriptures above every other source of human knowledge.
It has been pushed off the headlines of late, but the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod found itself facing just such a crisis in the 1970s and became front page and TV news overnight. (Once the protesting, banner-waving marches ended, however, the media lost interest.) Perhaps for the first time in such a confrontation church ministry and leadership stood firm to their view of the Scriptures. There was a schism, but only a limited one, and the Lutheran Church and its educational institutions have emerged more united and committed than ever.
People do not sacrifice for uncertainties! It is crucial, therefore, to the very existence of our church that we continue to know what we believe and why we believe it, where we have come from, and how we got from there to here. It is difficult to come up with that type of information and, at the same time, to devote neither time nor attention to history.
Look at the history of this college. It was conceived in sacrifice. It was nurtured in sacrifice because a handful of people believed that God had spoken to them in the Bible and through the special guidance of the Spirit. Theirs was not a self-centered faith. They saw, in what they believed, a divine commission to make known to others what God had revealed to them. Thus they had a message, and that message gave them their mission. The lesson of history is that if the message of a people is modified significantly, their mission will be modified, as well—typically it will begin to fail. Dr. P. Gerard Damsteegt's book, Foundations of the Seventh-day Adventist Message and Mission (Eerdmans, 1977), in my opinion one of the most significant books from an Adventist pen in recent years, shows that both our message and our sense of mission grew out of a consciousness that Bible prophecy—apocalyptic, predictive prophecy—had been, and was actually being, fulfilled in specific events either in heaven or on earth and some times both in tandem.
The system of prophetic interpretation followed by our Lord, by the apostles, by some early church fathers, by occasional witnesses in the dominant Roman Church of the Middle Ages, by the powerful and courageous men of the great German Protestant Reformation, by later Reformers of England, Switzerland, France, and Holland, by American expositors of the Colonial and early national periods, and by people of the worldwide, interchurch Advent Awakening of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries contained a key principle, as Damsteegt repeatedly demonstrates. This principle is what we speak of as the year-day principle, in which a day in the sweeping periods of prophesied movements and related events stands for a year of historical or chronological time. This principle pointed to key events in the life of our Lord on earth and to the long period of world domination by a church drunk with secular power and non-Biblical doctrine.
This year-day principle was at the heart of the historicist, or historical, school of prophetic interpretation followed by God's loyal witnesses for more than 1800 years. This system of prophetic interpretation saw the unfolding fulfillment of Bible prophecy in steady sequence from the prophets' day to the Second Advent at the end of the age. It recognized the parallels in the great outline prophecies of Daniel, of our Lord, and of the apostles (especially of John in the Revelation), identifying Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome as the four great powers ending in the breakup of the Roman Empire and followed by the rise of the persecuting "little horn" power of the papacy. Although with growing understanding and application as the events foretold drew nearer, the historicist school held to a persistent application of the year-day principle to the great time prophecies of Daniel and Revelation, especially emphasizing the seventy weeks and the 1260- and 2300-day periods. (In fact, the location of the termination point for the 1260 days of Daniel and John was anticipated and even published one hundred years before it came!) This system also strongly identified the "antichrist," the "little horn," and "the beast" as symbols of the papacy. This was widely recognized and proclaimed by the Reformers and even by some witnesses within the Catholic Church itself. This widespread understanding gave added direction and purpose to the Reformers.
This, then, is our Adventist heritage. Well, some say, it can't truly be ours; our Millerite progenitors did not come on the scene at all before 1820 or thereabouts, and we ourselves were not an organized movement before 1863.
In this observation is the base for a vital point: Our Adventist heritage did not begin in 1863, or even in 1820. Our heritage is one we have in common with the whole Protestant world. However, most of the Protestant world has abandoned, in one direction or the other, their prophetic heritage. A clue to our linkage with the Reformation is found in an observation by Bryan Ball, chairman of the religion department at Newbold College and a historian of theology. According to Dr. Ball, virtually every doctrine and practice Seventh-day Adventists hold was also held by one or more of the English Puritan divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries!
Really, our pioneers were scarcely innovators of anything. Nor were the Millerites, from whom we sprang. We didn't even invent 1844! Scores of voices in many different countries, languages, and churches were looking for the close of Daniel's 2300-day prophecy in 1843, 1844, or 1847—depending on where they placed the date of the crucifixion in the interconnected prophecy of Daniel's seventy weeks. These people all held and practiced the principles of the historicist school of interpretation as had the Reformers before them.
This system of prophetic interpretation was so effective in pointing to the reigning popes and the papal church as the antichrist, the beast, the little horn of Daniel and John that the great dominating power of the medieval church was being whittled away. People were losing confidence. So what happened?
What would you do if scholars all around were pointing Bible prophecy at you, and people began to agree? You could decide you didn't care, or you could say that the Bible is a fraud, or you could set up some other way to interpret it. Those are about the options. The details can be found in the four-volume work by Leroy E. Froom, The Prophetic Faith of our Fathers. In his study, Froom traces the rise of the Jesuits, their acceptance as an order, and their commissioning by the papacy in 1540. Two of the many bright minds among the Jesuits developed two alternate systems of prophetic interpretation—utterly incompatible with each other but designed to counter the historicist school of interpretation. One took the accusing Protestant finger and pointed it back to the beginning of the Christian era and even beyond. "There you will find your anitchrist," said Alcazar. And of course there was no papacy then.
"If you don't like that option," said Ribera, "let me turn your pointing finger forward to a short interval at the end of the age when an antichrist will arise." The papacy of the day was home free—if people would believe either the preterist school of Alcazar or the futurist school of Ribera. And some people did, of course. The Counter-Reformation, supported now by two opposing systems of prophetic interpretation, began to take the edge from the sword of prophetic truths wielded by the Reformers.
But that was not the whole of it yet.
Along came European rational, Protestant theologians who were already elevating reason, philosophy, experience, and science above the authority of the Bible. These individuals picked up Alcazar's preterist thinking and republished it in Holland, England, Germany, and America. To this day their successors have no real place in their theological scheme of things for predictive prophecy or the year-day principle. For these people, Daniel's little horn power, if it refers to anything, refers to Antiochus Epiphanes, who ruled for approximately three literal years in the period they generally consider to be the time when Daniel, or someone using his name, wrote his book.
Damsteegt used 14 pages in his book to show that our Millerite forebears deliberately turned away from these positions and methods of prophetic interpretation of those rationalist theologians who were following what has come to be known as the historical-critical approach to the Bible. Our Adventist pioneers gave no place to them. Ellen White clearly warned against them.
Who took the futurist bait? There were no Protestant takers for 300 years until Samuel Maitland and others accepted it. The Plymouth Brethren in England got it from Maitland, and with minor variations it has been (and is today) the standard interpretation of the antichrist for the fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic wings of Protestantism.
Seventh-day Adventists .stand almost alone today in holding consistently to the historicist school of prophetic interpretation. But such was the standard Protestant system until abandoned under the impact of the two Jesuit counter-systems. Why should there ever be voices in Adventism, whatever their declared intention, that would present interpretations pointing toward the compromising, and thus forsaking, of our Adventist heritage?
Two other directions taken by Protestant prophetic interpreters helped to dull the expectation of the imminent second advent of Christ in the Old World, and they have their ardent followers today both in the Old World and in the New. The first of these—speaking in tongues—broke out in Edward Irving's fashionable London Church and led to the eventual decline of his effective Advent witness. The second influence placed a major emphasis on the conversion of the Jews and their return to Palestine. Indeed, the impact of this idea greatly affects Western world diplomacy to this day.
There is something about human nature that is eager for change and the charting of the unknown. But there are not many prophetic unknowns today. The pioneers of this church checked out virtually all the possible paths and turned from the false. Must we go over the same ground again? It is true that God's Word urges us to look ahead. But it also says, "Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls" (Jer. 6:16).
Paraphrasing what God's servant wrote to the Hebrew Christians of Paul's day when they were losing their confidence in the priesthood of Jesus Christ, "Therefore we need to pay the closer attention to what we have heard, in case we drift away from it. For if the message declared by angels was valid and every disobedience and transgression received its reward, how shall we escape, having neglected so great salvation? Look out! Take care! We share in Christ only as we hold our first confidence firm to the end." (See Heb. 2:1, 2; 3:12-14.)
