EDITORIAL NOTE: From the AT Archive; Jan, Feb 1998

This article received more response than any other we published in 1998.

In seminary, church ministries professor Don Jacobson called me a maverick. Ivan Blazen remarked about my independence when I wrote my final exam in his class. After writing several pages exegeting a passage in Romans, I then wrote something like, "The above is the ‘right’ answer. But I don’t believe it. My understanding is as follows." Then I argued again for a position Blazen had vigorously opposed in class. Other students reported to me that one day when I was absent, history professor Mervyn Maxwell announced to the class that I’d never get a job as an Adventist pastor. And since then colleagues and employers have confirmed these early diagnoses, using phrases like "off the wall," "marching to a different drummer," "different."

So why am I glad to be a denominational Seventh-day Adventist? One reason is my understanding of the relationship between theology and doctrine. More on that in a moment, but first several vignettes:

I got a phone call the other day from a theologian famous for his cogent defenses of the prerogatives and authority of the Adventist system. I’ve argued with him long and hard, but this time I listened. He was deeply troubled. His latest research was leading him to believe that the Bible does not teach the traditional Adventist (and evangelical) understanding of the second coming. What to do?

On another occasion I visited with a pastor in the Southwest. As a result of years of study, he was convinced life on earth was at least 600 million years old and that evolution was the process God used to create all life forms.

People who worked with H. M. S. Richards, Sr. tell of asking him about various challenges to historic Adventist beliefs. Not infrequently, instead of giving them the silver bullet which would kill the question, he would reply he was aware of the difficulty and didn’t have a tidy answer; he just lived with the question.

I had a church member who was involved with the Shepherd’s Rod movement. On the basis of statements by Ellen White, they believed that Victor Houteff was her prophetic successor.

Recently, a denominational official declared to the Adventist Media Center staff that if we were serious about getting ready for Jesus to come we’d need to get the victory over eating milk and eggs.

In 1989, I met a friend, Richard Ruhling, M.D., outside the New Jersey campmeeting. He was distributing literature which proved beyond any question that Jesus was going to return before the end of 1994.

Graham Maxwell, on page two of Servants or Friends, writes that there is one verse which is "a key to understanding the rest of Scripture and God’s plan to restore peace in his universe. It is this offer of friendship recorded in John 15:15. . . . Friendship is the whole purpose and meaning of atonement."

What’s the purpose of this list of "Adventist ideas"? To illustrate the huge range of thought within Adventism. There are some who would like the church to return to a supposed golden era when Adventism was a monolithic, coherent way of reading the Bible and understanding the world. To achieve this kind of uniformity we’d have to get rid of many, if not most, of our scholars (professional and amateur). The reality is that if any two people spend enough time studying any complex subject, they will come to at least slightly divergent conclusions. And what subject is more complex than God and human interaction with him?

And there was no golden era. James White strongly disagreed with Uriah Smith over prophetic interpretation. He suppressed his views so the fledgling denomination would not have to invest energy in deliberating competing viewpoints. In the late 1800s there was intense disagreement over the process of salvation and the deity of Christ.

Thinking, studying people simply can’t be confined in a small box. Thus it has always been. So what is the value of the denomination and its doctrinal statements? Simply this: it gives us a center from which to deviate. A center through which we can reconnect with one another in spite of our diversity. The church needs a formal core of doctrine that defines normative Adventism. Twenty-seven statements may be too many, but there must be more than "I believe in the Bible" or "I believe in Jesus."

Jaroslav Pelikan, in his five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, distinguishes between theology, which is the thought of individuals, and doctrine, the thought of the church. The two always live in tension. Doctrine usually is the reaction of the church to theology. That is, an individual articulates new ideas and the church reacts. Doctrine is always conservative. It expresses what the church has already come to believe. At minimum, doctrine must be supported by a majority of those present and voting, whether we’re talking about the Council of Nicea in 325 or the General Conference at Utrecht, ’95.

Theology, on the other hand, because it is the work of individuals, is inescapably idiosyncratic. It describes one person’s understanding of God. Sure, theology is done in dialogue with other theologians, doctrine, culture, etc. But still the finished product expresses the mind and heart of one person. Doctrine expresses the mind and heart of a community.

So how do we connect theology and doctrine? What should be the relationship between the church and theologians?

On one hand, theologians must acknowledge that the validity and the value of doctrine does not depend on the personal convictions of theologians. Doctrine is the heritage of their community; it is not the fruit of their personal quest. By their very nature, theologians are driven to proclaim their conclusions. But their conclusions are not doctrine. Their conclusions may lead to the formation or reshaping of doctrine, but when this happens it is no longer the theologian’s work; it becomes the work of the community.

On the other hand, the church must acknowledge that the more detailed its doctrinal statement, the less it can require theologians to affirm they are personally persuaded on every point. Administrators who insist both on a highly specific statement of doctrine AND the personal commitment of theologians to every point in the statement are defining a very small church, one that will be too small for many of our children.

The SDA denomination provides an ideological, social, spiritual, and yes, even institutional center from which creative thinkers can and will diverge. It provides a nexus, a connective center, through which all the mavericks, eccentrics, fanatics and dissidents can connect with each other, with their parents, children and siblings and high school and college classmates.

If we are going to have theologians, that is people (amateurs or professionals) who devote their lives to the exploration of words about God, we must expect a diversity of viewpoints. It is a denial of the creativity which is part of the image of God to insist that all theologians agree with each other or with every point of a detailed doctrinal statement.

At the same time, if we are going to have a community (and this is indispensable for wholesome spiritual life), we must insist that not all the ruminations of theologians deserve the label "doctrine." In fact, the community must be free to explicitly label some theology as "maverick," "eccentric," "aberrant."

Theology divides us because no two theologians agree on everything. Doctrine can unite us, even when we are arguing with it. The doctrinal core which the denomination transmits from one generation to the next forms the seedbed from which the infinite variety of our thoughts emerge. It provides the common ground for arguments among us, the common bond that keeps us from degenerating into a loose aggregation of clever, lonely individuals. There is a delicious sense of adventure in roaming beyond the confines of doctrine.

One’s own discoveries are so much more exciting than hand-me-downs. If we silence our theologians, the church will lose the sparkle and vitality that interests our children in spiritual matters.

On the other hand, doctrine is an essential part of the glue that holds together the institutions in which most of us acquire the skills needed to engage in the adventure of theology. Neutralize the glue and the institutions fall apart. And if the institutions disappear, the church will lose a major part of the connectivity between generations. If we discard our doctrine, the church will lack the structure our children will need when it comes their turn to pass on the faith to their children.

Luther remarked that both popes and councils contradicted themselves and each other. He should have added theologians to the list. If "the church in session" is infallible, then we must all return to Rome, historically the mother church of Protestantism. And if theologians have the last word, then what do we say about the brilliant German theologians who advocated Nazism? What do we say about the amateur theologians Koresh and Jones? Somehow, the right way must hold church and theologians together.

Church history tells us that the interaction between the church with its established doctrine and theologians with their personal visions of God and truth cannot be reduced to a simple formula. Neither is always right; neither is always trustworthy. But neither is superfluous. A living, effective church needs both theology and doctrine. The relationship between the two will always be in flux. If we try to simplify things by suppressing either we’ll diminish our ability to do our God-given work.