Book Review: A Remnant in Crisis, by Jack Provonsha (Review and Herald, 1993)

In A Remnant In Crisis, Jack Provonsha describes a major crisis among Adventists in the first world—the United States, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand—where Adventism began and where it now has second-generation members and beyond and mature educational systems. The crisis involves a significant number of church members, especially younger members, who are well-educated and upwardly mobile. The problem, sometimes described as a “mid-life” identity crisis, proceeds from a growing feeling of apprehension regarding traditional formulations of the church’s message. Many members are increasingly uncomfortable with traditional Adventist views of the denomination as “the remnant church,” “God’s true church,” and “the people of God.”

In Provonsha’s view, the historical roots of the crisis can be found, in part, in the church’s development of an accredited educational system, which was needed to support a fully accredited medical school. Within two generations in the first-world church, higher education has produced an increasingly well-educated class of professionals and academics who represent a sociological and cultural pluralism. The realities of the contemporary world have, for cultural Adventists, slowly eroded their expectations of an imminent second coming and caused them to question the authority of Ellen White and the significance of 1844.

According to Provonsha, the disease is a loss of the sense of uniqueness and thus the loss of a key traditional reason for the existence of the Adventist Church. The treatment he prescribes is to re-examine what Adventists traditionally call the Third Angel’s Message and find the essential truth beneath the “ant language,” the figures of speech and symbolic expressions with which we have traditionally tried to communicate God’s message at the human level. We need to capture a sense of being a “movement” rather than an institution. In so doing, we must acknowledge the essential truth of Adventist doctrine and give it new, contemporary language.

I believe Provonsha would admit that scholars over the last 25 years have produced documentary evidence which broadly reconstructs what really occurred in the development of Adventist theology and polity, and what role Ellen White played in that process. As one might expect, this documented history differs from the traditional mythologies, but while Provonsha agrees that the founders of the Adventist church were theologically naive, he backs away from these scholarly findings.

Provonsha quotes Ellen White extensively, with a strategy of using her later, better-known statements while ignoring some of her earlier, less mature passages on the same topics. He suggests that she habitually neglected quotation marks when using the words of others because she had an unusual sensitivity to “intuitions or promptings of the Spirit.” I find this an example of Provonsha’s heroic argumentation, a desperate but weak effort to rescue Ellen White’s image where threatened by one of her puzzling habits.

Provonsha notes that our founders believed that events associated with the Great Disappointment of 1844 have great eschatological or prophetic significance. He agrees that the Great Disappointment has cosmic and theological significance along with such events as Sinai, the Incarnation, and the Second Advent, and he asserts that to abandon this position is to diminish an essential rationale for the Adventist church. He states, however, that regarding prophetic interpretation,”it is more important what they [church founders] believed and what they did than what Daniel had in mind. The issue is resolved by history rather than by exegesis.” This argument demonstrates one of Provonsha’s highest priorities—to maintain a supernatural sanction for the Adventist church even if one must then admit to a problematical exegesis of a biblical text.

A Remnant in Crisis is fundamentally an apologetic for historic Adventism. It does seek to moderate some cultic aspects of traditional Adventism, and it addresses a major problem confronting the contemporary church in the first world. As an apologetic, it has the virtues of being literate and, generally speaking, intellectually honest. It needs to be widely read.