A heated debating
concerning the humanity of Christ and His sinlessness ensued in the 1950s among
the Seventh-Day Adventist Church members, and the debate persists to this day.
It centers primarily on statements made by their main source of doctrinal
authority, Ellen White (d. 1915), a co-founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist movement,
considered by its adherents a prophetess. The subject of the humanity of Christ
is still debated among Adventists because by their admission of one of her
followers and apologists, “she never treated the subject as a whole in a
systematic way” (J.R. Zurcher, Touched with Our Feelings: A Historical Survey
of Adventist Thought on the Human Nature of Christ [1999], p. 54). The
author traces the development of the Adventists’ views on the subject from the beginning
of the movement in the 1850’s to almost the end of last century. The movement
has traveled the entire gamut of the doctrine from their initial postlapsarian
position (1850’s to 1950’s), to a prelapsarian one (1950s’ to 1990’s) and,
since then, to the current prevalent position, which is a harmonizing of the
two. The debate continues because neither White nor her fellow-Adventists go
beyond the biblical evidence. To the extent the biblical evidence is not clear,
they cannot be clear.
Woodrow W. Whidden
(b. 1944) suggests that his fellow Adventists treat the subject of the humanity
of Christ as “processive [sic] Adventism,” defined by him as “important but
still unsettled,” one notch higher than “non essential Adventism” but lower
than other subjects categorized as “eternal verities” and “essential Adventism”
(Woodrow W. Whidden, Ellen White on the Humanity of Christ: A Chronological
Study [1997], p. 78). Another Adventist theologian is more direct: “He came
. . . bearing the very flesh of a dry, twisted, fallen humanity.” . . . “He
carried the virus of sin because He was born into this world that way” (Larry
Kirkpatrick, Jesus: The Unesteemed). We find the theology of the
Adventists to be shallow. It barely even goes beyond the scriptural witness and
the writings of their visionary founder. Their fidelity to Scripture is commendable,
but the Holy Scripture is not a manual, where everything necessary for
salvation is spelled out. Many theological differences that have arisen among
Christians were due not only to misunderstandings and misinterpretations of
biblical passages, but also to the fact that Scripture does not provide clear
answers even to foundational questions about the Trinity, the deity of Christ,
personhood, and deity and procession of the Holy Spirit, etc., including the
human nature of Christ. (Emmanuel Hatzidakis, Jesus Fallen? The Human Nature
of Christ Examined from an Eastern Orthodox Perspective [Clearwater, Fla.: Orthodox
Witness, 2013], 17)
