Our Roots, Pt. 3

As promised, this series is now going to start systematically examining the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s organizational structure, how it has changed over the years, and the reasons behind its current configuration. To do this we are going to use three primary sources of material. The first is www.whiteestate.org, which maintains an online library of all published materials by Ellen White. The second is www.adventistarchives.org, the website of the Archives and Statistics Department of the General Conference. This site offers a substantial library of past issues of official periodicals, records of official meetings, books and papers on church issues, and even pre-Adventist periodicals and documents going back as far as 1844. Since reading, much less studying in detail in order to create a comprehensive presentation, all of the material on these two sites would be the work of years we are going to cheat a little bit through the use of our third source. As it turns out, a fair chunk of this work has already been done for us in the form of a doctoral dissertation written by one Barry David Oliver while in pursuit of a PhD in Christian Ministry from Andrews University. Dr. Oliver concentrated his research on the organizational developments between 1888 and 1903, and we will be drawing significantly from his work when discussing that period. (As a point of passing interest, Dr. Oliver is currently serving the Adventist Church as President of the South Pacific Division, a territory which includes Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and a number of smaller islands in the region.) Having mentioned our references here, we will not be crediting them again in this series unless quoting directly.

In order to thoroughly examine the origins of the Adventist Church’s organizational structure, we must first briefly consider the origins of the Seventh-day Adventist Church itself. As was described in Advice from the Spirit of Prophesy, Pt. 30, the Adventist Church grew out of the Millerite Movement of the early 1840s. The leader of this movement was William Miller (who so far as we know was not an ancestor of the William Miller presently serving as President of the Potomac Conference). Miller came to a significant conclusion while studying Daniel 8:14, “And he said to me, ‘For two thousand three hundred days; then the sanctuary shall be cleansed.’” This is the final component of an extended time prophesy. The “he” referred to in the verse was the angel that was explaining the prophesy to Daniel.

Miller interpreted the “sanctuary” referred to in this verse to mean the earth, and the “cleansing” of it to be the final cleansing from sin that would occur at the second coming of Jesus Christ. From there he had only to fix the start of the allotted time based on the fulfillment of the events prophesied earlier in the prophetic vision of Daniel 8. (We should explain here the concept of “prophetic time.” When biblical time prophesies use the term “days” they are referring to literal years, so this prophesy was actually specifying a period of 2,300 years.) The conclusion Miller came to was that the second coming of Jesus Christ was to occur in October of 1844 (originally he had believed the date to be in 1843, but later concluded that his math hadn’t taken into account differences in ancient calendar systems). When Miller came to this conclusion he was impressed that he needed to warn the world of its approaching end.

The spread of this message brought mixed reactions. Some accepted it joyfully and joined in the work of spreading the message. Others ridiculed it. At that time it was a commonly held belief within Protestantism that the second coming of Jesus Christ would be preceded by 1,000 years of world peace. Since there were still wars actively underway at that time it was believed that the second coming was, at a minimum, still 1,000 years away. This belief gave rise to a complacency which many weren’t happy to have disturbed. When the clamor of those who accepted Miller’s message reached a point where the organized churches could no longer ignore it they reacted by removing those individuals from church membership. When this happened the Millerites simply took to meeting together informally as they waited for the second coming to be accomplished. But then the date came and Jesus did not. This failure to show came to be known as the Great Disappointment.

There were four different ways the Millerites reacted to the Great Disappointment. Some went crawling back to the churches they had previously been members of and tried to forget the whole embarrassing incident. Others maintained that the second coming was still to occur, but they had somehow gotten the date wrong yet again. This group continued to set new dates until it eventually fizzled out. The third group concluded that Jesus Christ must have come after all, but that it was a spiritual coming rather than a physical coming. This group was the beginning of modern Spiritualism. The last group of Millerites went back to study their Bibles again in search of what they had gotten wrong. This brought them to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with their math, but rather that they had misunderstood the nature of the “cleansing” of the “sanctuary” which was prophesied to occur on that day.

To shorten the story a bit, what this final group came to understand was that the “sanctuary” spoken of in Daniel 8:14 was not the earth, but rather a “sanctuary” in heaven. You will recall that when the Israelites were in the wilderness God gave them this instruction, “Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them. Make this tabernacle and all its furnishings exactly like the pattern I will show you.” (Exodus 25:8, 9, emphasis supplied) During their time as slaves the Israelites had largely forgotten their own religion and their knowledge of God, so one of the first things God did after freeing them was to re-instill this knowledge. He did this through an earthly sanctuary and sacrifice system that human minds could understand, as a metaphor for heavenly things. Sacrificing animals couldn’t actually save the Israelites (or anyone else) from sin—but it did serve as a metaphor to point the Israelites by experience to the sacrifice which could save us—that of Jesus Christ.

All of this metaphor system was patterned after the real sanctuary system, and its real sacrifice, which is in heaven. “For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made with human hands that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence.” (Hebrews 9:24) It is this metaphor provided by the earthly sanctuary system which explains to us what was really meant in Daniel about the sanctuary being cleansed. In the earthly system, sacrifices would be made all year long and, by them, the sin of the people was symbolically transferred to the sanctuary. Once a year the sanctuary would be cleansed of this symbolically transferred sin through a ritual which involved the High Priest entering the Most Holy Place. In the real sanctuary in heaven, Jesus is both the sacrifice and the High Priest. He doesn’t go through the cycle of accumulating and cleansing sin every year as in the metaphor system. Instead, he does it once for all. The prophesy of Daniel 8:14 is specifying the time when Jesus would go from “regular” Godly/sacrificial/High Priestly duties in the heavenly sanctuary to the final, cleansing duties in the heavenly sanctuary which would immediately precede His second coming. So while this prophesy wasn’t about the actual second coming, it was an indicator that that event was to happen soon. (For more detail about the heavenly sanctuary, read further in the book of Hebrews.)

Once this final group of Millerites came to understand this biblical truth they had to figure out what to do with it (and about themselves). Their discovery meant that while the second coming was not quite so imminent as they had thought, the processes preceding its arrival had begun. This was something that they could not simply ignore, and the churches they had come out of before the Great Disappointment weren’t interested in having them back while they insisted on messing with the comfortable order of things with their new theology. Being their own ongoing group also posed some difficulties since except for their understanding of this prophetic event (which came to be known as the “sanctuary doctrine”) they had very little theology in common. Other than the generality of all being Christian each brought to the table the varying slants on doctrine accepted by the diverse denominations they had come out of.

To reconcile these differences they took, once again, to studying their Bibles. They held numerous informal conferences at which large groups of Advent believers, as they loosely called themselves, would gather for prolonged periods of Bible study and prayer on specific points of theology. They would not let a subject rest until they had achieved a common understanding which was based on a solid biblical foundation. One of their more surprising discoveries during these conferences was that the practice of observing Sunday as the day of worship had no foundation in the Bible. Since they could find no biblical basis for the change from the seventh-day Sabbath (Saturday) to Sunday, they returned to the original day of worship set up by God in the Garden of Eden. It would be these two distinctive doctrines (the soon coming of Christ as indicated by the events of prophesy and the seventh-day Sabbath) that formed the basis of the fledgling denomination’s identity.

Next: Seeds of Order