Saturday, June 5, 2021

Emmanuel Hatzidakis (EO) on the Debate Amongst Seventh-Day Adventists About the Nature of Jesus' Humanity

 

 

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)