"God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." —Romans 5:8

God is love. This is the most essential Adventist conviction. While other ideas have been formative historically in Adventist evangelism and self-understanding–the authority of the Bible, the sanctuary, the Sabbath, distinctive interpretations of the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation—I regard these as scaffolding God has used to build a clearer understanding of his love. These other beliefs are not ends in themselves. “God is love” is both the foundation and the goal of Adventist theology.

The most influential theological voice in Adventism is that of Ellen White. Her most highly regarded works are The Conflict of the Ages series, a five-volume narrative commentary on the Bible, and Steps to Christ, a handbook of basic Christian spirituality. The first sentence of the first book in The Conflict series is “God is love.” The final sentence of the last book ends with “God is love.” Between these two declarations, White works to show that love has been the overarching motivation for every act of God. Creation, the work of prophets, and God’s forgiveness of Israel’s sins were expressions of divine love. Of course. But so were the acts of severity–Noah’s flood, the execution of Uzzah, the Babylonian captivity.

White works to persuade us that the sternest actions attributed to God in the Bible are best explained as divine “tough love.”

White opens Steps to Christ with a paean to God’s love. Spiritual life does not begin with our quest for God or even our hunger for God, but rather with his affectionate regard for us. The first chapter, titled, “God’s Love for Man,” begins:

“Nature and revelation alike testify of God’s love.…The sunshine and the rain, that gladden and refresh the earth, the hills and seas and plains, all speak to us of the Creator’s love. It is God who supplies the daily needs of all His creatures.…

“Even amid the suffering that results from sin, God’s love is revealed. It is written that God cursed the ground for man’s sake. Genesis 3:17. The thorn and the thistle—the difficulties and trials that make his life one of toil and care—were appointed for his good as a part of the training needful in God’s plan for his uplifting from the ruin and degradation that sin has wrought...

“‘God is love’ is written upon every opening bud, upon every spire of springing grass. The lovely birds making the air vocal with their happy songs, the delicately tinted flowers in their perfection perfuming the air, the lofty trees of the forest with their rich foliage of living green—all testify to the tender, fatherly care of our God and to his desire to make his children happy...

“God has bound our hearts to him by unnumbered tokens in heaven and in earth. Through the things of nature, and the deepest and tenderest earthly ties that human hearts can know, he has sought to reveal himself to us. Yet these but imperfectly represent his love” (Steps to Christ, pp. 9, 10).

I am citing White here not as a theological authority but as historical evidence. I am not suggesting her words prove God is love, but they are compelling evidence that in Adventist theology this conviction is foundational.

In recent decades there has been scholarly debate over the precise nature of White’s authorship. She made extensive use of copied material and literary assistants. But even if it could be demonstrated that someone other than White was directly responsible for the emphasis on love evident in her most revered works, that would if anything strengthen my argument. If we as a community were to assign someone to “write in the prophet’s name,” we would assign someone whose central conviction was God is love. The statements about God’s love in the Ellen White corpus are not mere decoration; they are not epicycles. They are integral to the central themes of the books.

As of 2004, the Seventh-day Adventist creed included 27 doctrinal statements ranging from a declaration that the Bible is the trustworthy revelation of God to a prohibition on smoking. Our church has never formally declared which of our doctrines are most important or most foundational. You could probably find examples of individual Adventists making almost any one of our doctrinal statements central in their thought and practice. Adventists are (to understate it) diverse. But the leading exponents of the major varieties of Adventism would unhesitatingly affirm that the great bedrock truth is God is love. Every other conviction is tested by this conviction.

One distinctive Adventist doctrine is our rejection of the common Christian teaching that hell is a place of continuous, eternal torment. Adventists adduce a number of Bible passages in support of our belief that hell is an event at the end of time rather than a place of ongoing torment. An increasing number of Protestant biblical scholars publicly teach that the New Testament view of hell is similar to the Adventist doctrine. The Adventist position is biblically defensible. But when I trace the history of our rejection of eternal hell, what strikes me is not the force of the specific biblical data, but the strength of the intuitive conviction that a God of love could not torture anyone forever. Our quest for biblical evidence against eternal torment was driven by an unshakable certainty that God is love.

An Adventist practice strongly linked with this conviction about God’s love is health care. Progressive Adventism has been driven in large part by medical professionals working in conventional medicine. Fundamentalist Adventism, on the other hand, has been anchored by small institutions that teach or provide alternative medical therapies emphasizing proper diet, exercise, and hydrotherapy. Both Progressives and Fundamentalists, who oppose each other in so many ways, appeal to the truth of God’s love as a prime justification for what they are doing. God’s love for people who are hurting provides the model for their health care mission. And each group argues their theology is the most congruent with the love of God.

We don’t agree on the details of what it means to be loving. We argue about the meaning and appropriateness of “tough love.” We debate the connection between love and retribution. Does love for the victim require retributive justice or does love for the perpetrator preclude it? But we carry on the debate with the shared assumption that our conclusions must align with our central conviction that God is love.

Adventists usually picture heaven as being very earthy and real. Instead of clouds and harps, we imagine people talking with God, studying, traveling, building houses, playing with animals. It’s not that we really think we know what heaven will be like, but we are utterly confident God in his love will make sure our future is better than our best imagination.

In line with a long Jewish and Christian history, Adventists have given a lot of attention to theodicy–the question of God’s justice in the light of human suffering. We vigorously reject one classic resolution of this problem–God is God and can do whatever he wishes. We insist the final answer to this question cannot turn the assertion God is love on its head. A key element of the final judgment is a demonstration of the truth of these words in a way that makes sense to the human mind.

For Adventists the central theme in the human story is God’s work to create a community of beings who will love him and each other. Creation was God’s action of “giving birth” as a parent. All the acts of God, from sending of Jesus to save sinners to the decisions of the final judgment, are expressions of love. Even the misery and tragedy of human existence get linked to God’s love by interpreting pain and evil as consequences of human abuse of the freedom necessary for genuine love. Eventually, evil and suffering will disappear and God’s love will triumph. Through the judgment process, all humanity will be finally convinced that God could not have “done it better.” That future is describe in the final lines of Ellen White’s most famous book:

“And the years of eternity, as they roll, will bring richer and still more glorious revelations of God and of Christ. As knowledge is progressive so will love, reverence and happiness increase. The more men learn of God, the greater will be their admiration of his character.…

“The great controversy is ended. Sin and sinners are no more. The entire universe is clean. One pulse of harmony and gladness beats through the vast creation. From him who created all, flow life and light and gladness, throughout the realms of illimitable space. From the minutest atom to the greatest world, all things, animate and inanimate, in their unshadowed beauty and perfect joy, declare that God is love (The Great Controversy, p. 678).

This is the first Adventist conviction.