This is the first installment in a two-part review of the work of Dr. Provonsha. The second installment will appear in the next issue of Adventist Today.

Jack Provonsha is one of the most significant theologians in the Adventist church in the last century. He filled various roles—religion professor to perhaps 9,000 students at Loma Linda University over a period of 28 years, consultant to various church administrators for a quarter century, author of scores of essays and five books, and teacher of a popular Sabbath School class whose tapes were distributed worldwide. But Provonsha’s impact on his church transcends individual roles. Provonsha’s enduring spiritual ethos is an intellectual integrity that allows the next generation of Adventist theologians to stand on his shoulders. And Provonsha saw himself, as he put it, standing on the “giant shoulders” of the Adventist pioneer—and he might have added, contemporary theologians.

An analysis of Provonsha’s major books portrays him as increasingly espousing his Adventist roots. Provonsha used his considerable talents to elaborate—for the modern person—a more intellectually palatable version of Adventism. Interestingly, Provonsha’s only book written and published after his retirement in 1985, Remnant in Crisis (hereafter, Remnant), focused exclusively on Adventist uniqueness. However, Provonsha cannot be fully appreciated without understanding two central concerns that undergird and inform all his later work—love and epistemology. Not coincidently, the questions of how we love and how we know were also vital to mainline ethicists and theologians that Provonsha read and studied in graduate school. And those were moderate to liberal thinkers.

How We Love

Christian love remains the central, unchanging constant for Provonsha. In his unpublished Christian Ethics in a Situation of Change, 1967 (hereafter, Christian Ethics), he concludes that every decision must be made on the basis of “whether it is ultimately for or against love.” Near the conclusion of Remnant, 26 years later, Provonsha claims that the “finishing of the work” will come when “all can see the difference between self-service and sacrificial love” (147).

In using agape as the fundamental principle in his work, Provonsha was in keeping with a key theme of long standing, and he drew on several leading Christian thinkers: Anders Nygren, Paul Ramsey, Paul Lehman, Gene Outka and Joseph Fletcher.

Provonsha defines agape as “spontaneous and underived” love of the other, and wholly of divine origin. However, the crucial human role is in providing the occasion or situation for agape’s reign. Only “the right action, the loving action, will be the one rendering agape possible.” Whether a person opts for this loving action is totally up to the person; more specifically it involves a person’s freedom to choose.

Provonsha is emphatic and extensive in his treatment of human freedom. He declares that agape “presupposes” human freedom, and here he doesn’t mean some carefully nuanced philosophical category, but the “old-fashioned” kind. Provonsha sees freedom as a natural part of the human being, as “something inherent in man qua man” (Christian Ethics, 28). The importance of freedom to Provonsha can hardly be overemphasized. The essential notion is that human beings, created in God’s image, are innately endowed with a freedom to choose good or evil, right or wrong. The very idea of selfless love for God and others is dependent on a person’s being able to consciously and freely choose such love. If freedom is an illusion, the idea of a loving action is meaningless.

For Bertrand Russell, one’s decisions are mere preferences. But for Provonsha one’s capacity for moral choice is nothing less than our creation in the divine image. Here Provonsha follows Reinhold Niebuhr who emphasizes the human capacity for self-transcendence. Humans, like lower animals, are often driven by instincts and natural proclivities. But only human beings can deliberate and responsibly decide. Provonsha cites Paul Tillich who writes that humans have such freedom that “’man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity’”(Christian Ethics, 43). Provonsha saw significant coherence between contemporary theology and Ellen White on the relevance of freedom.

How We Know

Provonsha is particularly indebted to contemporary philosophy for a key element of his epistemology, the study of how we know. Here Provonsha unapologetically invokes metaphor and symbol as the only means we have for talking of God and also for understanding the significance of Christ’s salvific death.

Again, following Tillich, Provonsha distinguished sign from symbol. Whereas a sign is arbitrarily chosen to designate its subject, a symbol partakes in the reality toward which it points. Provonsha frequently cites the Sabbath as possessing some important symbolic qualities. But in regard to God, “all” that we say is only symbolic. Provonsha’s modesty about God-claims goes beyond this. Our very idea of God contains our own “need and wish fulfillment.” This notion is expressed elsewhere by Provonsha’s view that our “creative memories” are often at work in our re-creation of the past. We humans adapt things as they once were to “the deeper needs of the present. We do not see things as they are or even as they were. We see them as we are.” Provonsha confesses that some of the old ideas are more “emotionally and intellectually satisfying” (God Is With Us, 7,68).

Another word for symbol is “event-window.” Provonsha sees various Hebrew rituals as such windows—the ancient Day of Atonement, the heavenly sanctuary, and particularly the Sabbath (You Can Go Home Again, 103; hereafter, Home Again).

Significantly, at times Provonsha embraces socio-historical criticism to expose the human nature of religious doctrine. Regarding various atonement theories, he explains how a thinker came to a particular emphasis by indicating the prevailing form of government. For instance, Provonsha explains Anselm’s theory of “satisfaction” (that is, divine justice must be satisfied) as a result of his socio-political milieu in which sin was analogous to a serf dishonoring his feudal lord and either accepting punishment or providing an alternate satisfaction.

Provonsha contends that we can learn about God, at least provisionally, “ by beholding man.” We learn such things as God’s unity, his personhood, and his goodness.

Provonsha sees the New Testament writers using a variety of metaphors to describe the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. None of them are adequate to the event; they are all symbols or event-windows that illuminate but do not fully disclose. The problem is that theologians have taken them literally and drawn too much from the mere symbols. They didn’t realize that the New Testament writers were using, as we all use, “ant language.”

In the next installment we will examine the increasingly Adventist accent and focus of Provonsha’s work as he matured.

Jim Walters teaches at Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, Calif. in the department of religion. He is a founding member of Adventist Today.