July 1, 1993 - 12:00pm - Frank Knittel

The Orlando billboard campaign has plunged the Seventh-day Adventist church into a precarious state which may very well collapse our denominational structure. The church is at a most crucial crossroads, perhaps the most critical in all its history. The issue has created unprecedented discussion, anger, confusion, and grist for the mills of many Orlando talk shows and newspaper editorials. Most Orlando residents believe that the campaign maligns Catholics.

Based on what is written in The Great Controversy, Adventists have been conditioned to believe that the Sabbath is the first and foremost truth of the Scriptures. This has been presented as the last great test before the end of time, and that test is seen as precipitated by actions of the papacy. If that is Adventist belief, then the church must preach it. And the church has: public evangelistic crusades have been traditionally built around the beasts of Daniel and Revelation.

Thus the stage was set for some troubling declarations by the initiators of the Orlando billboards. That group asserts that the church cannot denounce what they are doing in Orlando and then at the same time support its own traditional eschatology. The group solemnly intones that the denomination cannot distance itself from something that it emphatically declares is a vital truth and try to water down the message in order to save embarrassment. And finally it is declared, if the church is going to be embarrassed by what it preaches, it needs to stop proclaiming the traditional message. This is the platform of the billboard group.

So how do we react to all this? I cannot divine what official position our corporate church leadership will take. Most of us would probably hope that billboard money will run out and that the commotion will end. That is an optimistic wish, and we can be assured that the issue will arise again—if not in Orlando, then somewhere else.

I would offer some hopeful postures that we can take to the Orlando campaign.

First, I submit that the first and greatest truth of the Scriptures is Jesus and Him crucified. If we want to lease billboards, let us put that kind of message on them, not a picture of the pope flanked by the cover of a book other than the Bible.

Second, we must understand that nowhere in The Great Controversy does the author ever declare that everything in that book was revealed to her personally. Significant portions of the volume were extracted from popular historical and theological writers of the time. A Scottish minister first penned the memorable statement on page 588 of The Great Controversy, asserting that at the time of the end, apostate Protestantism would grasp the hand of spiritualism, and the two of them would reach across the abyss and join with the papacy in the persecution of God’s people. That concept did not originate in the Seventh-day Adventist church.

Moreover, that which Ellen White wrote about the Catholic Church was a position commonly held by most Protestant churches in North America in the 19th century. In the 19th century there was a very strong anti-Catholic bias among Protestants, especially in America. Little or nothing of what Ellen White said about the papacy is unique to her volume. She agreed with the prevailing beliefs.

Third, evidence indicates that some rather massive passages in The Great Controversy were selected by editors from articles Ellen White previously wrote and were not chosen by White before the book was published.

Fourth, we must not base any spiritual warning to the world on evidence which we feel is found in any book other than the Bible. White gave Adventism her interpretation of the Scriptures, and her view is not infallible.

Our message to the world, as Paul declared for himself, is Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and a detailed accounting of the prophecies and an exposition of the Sabbath is secondary. Whatever we wish to believe about prophecy is our own right and responsibility, but whatever we believe should be based totally upon what we derive from our own study of the Bible and not upon anything written by anyone since the canon of the Scriptures was established. We have almost destroyed ourselves by our passionate disinclination to search for ourselves, and we wear out the pages of the Ellen White Index when we should instead be studying the Bible.

That is what is wrong with the billboards in Orlando. They are diabolic in that they propose to the world that the writings of a person in the last hundred and thirty years are the scripture for the hour, that an interpretation offered by a person is a proper substitute for perusal of the Bible. They leap ahead of God.