September 28, 2006 - 12:00pm - Alden Thompson Parties are supposed to be fun, especially birthday parties. So why is ours such a pain? I’m talking here about our 1844 birthday party. Like all birthdays, it rolls around every year. Why can’t we just make peace with it and get on with life? It’s as if a woman were facing her 29th birthday every year. Our annual October 22 anguish cannot be resolved in just one short column. Several tensions “natural� to our human condition are at work here, tensions heightened as a result of sin. But those tensions help explain why we choose up sides with such intensity. If we could recognize them without hostility or condescension, our autumn shudders might be less severe. But even recognizing the inevitability of these tensions is only a small first step toward a more harmonious community. How many of us have traits of character, habits, ways of thinking that we have “recognized� and would give almost anything to change – but seem almost powerless to do so? We need a more compassionate awareness of each other’s inherited and cultivated impulses. Ellen White could point us to the experience of the twelve apostles as a model. She notes that Jesus brought them together “with their different faults, all with inherited and cultivated tendencies to evil; but in and through Christ they were to dwell in the family of God, learning to become one in faith, in doctrine, in spirit. They would have their tests, their grievances, their differences of opinion; but while Christ was abiding in the heart, there could be no dissension� (Desire of Ages, 296). That’s heady idealism. But it’s worth a try. Do we have permission? A pointed, indeed, a revolutionary word from Ellen White gives us just that: The opening lines of The Ministry of Healing chapter, “In Contact with Others,� bluntly state that “our understanding of truth, our ideas in regard to the conduct of life are not in all respects the same� (MH 483). In other words, we can disagree on some things and still be good Adventists. As important as it might be to address a full list of the “natural� tensions tagging along at our 1844 birthday party, here I will focus on just one, the tension between concrete and abstract thinking. That, I suspect, is a major factor in the discussion, with the polar positions illustrated by these two quotes: “If 1844 is not sound, then we might as well disband our church.� “Nothing happened in 1844.� And this is where birthday party language becomes important, for grumblers can claim that “nothing happened� in heaven in 1844, but they can’t say that about planet earth. In pain and agony, that’s when the Adventist church was born. Since that’s something on which we can all agree, that’s where we should start to explore our differences. So let’s begin with the Adventist claim that an event of great significance happened in heaven in 1844. In one sense, that’s a safe claim, because we can’t head there with our cameras to bring back the proof. Is it not remarkable that we can argue so vehemently over what happens in a place we are forbidden to enter? When we are granted the privilege of entrance, I suspect we’ll all be able to chuckle over our differences. But we’re not there yet. It is helpful to note here that our modern culture privileges the abstract thinkers. Whether they have snatched it for themselves or have been given that “honor� by others is debatable. But the stereotype is confirmed by no less an authority than the popular 16 PF personality test. In its description of “reasoning,� one of the 16 personality factors in that test, the test results has concrete thinkers as “less intelligent,� and abstract thinkers as “more intelligent.� It was printed out in those very words on my test results in 1965 when I first took the test; it was still that way in 1981 when I took it again. And it’s still there on-line in 2006. Those are not happy thoughts for concrete-thinking conservatives. But now let me confess my own concrete-thinking impulses before we go further. I still “see� the angels in heaven entering their data with quill pens; I still “see� the open ark of God in heaven with the halo over the fourth command�compliments of Ellen White’s vision. And I still “see� death and hell being cast into the lake of fire. Those three examples are all significant because I remember being surprised in each case when I realized that my pictures probably did not reflect the heavenly reality. Still, the pictures are important for pointing me to a greater reality. Abstract-thinking people are much quicker to abandon the images, and may be tempted to snatch them away from those who need them. And that’s what makes concrete-thinking people so uneasy. If you take the 1844 event in strictly concrete terms, you can end up following all kinds of silly dead-end trails: If Jesus entered the most holy place in 1844, is he still there today? When does he take a lunch break? Are the angels still pouring over the books? But let’s be very careful with each other’s pictures. We need them to make sense out of our world. Quite frankly, I much prefer the Myers-Briggs temperament test, for it describes our differences without the nasty, judgmental language. Myers-Briggs seeks to demonstrate that there are many different kinds of “intelligence.� The world needs them all. Abstract thinkers, in particular, can be very impractical. Popular anti-intellectual stereotypes make that point. Shortly after I returned to the college classroom after completing my PhD, I was erasing the board at the end of class one day. A student who remained behind commented: “I didn’t know PhD’s knew how to erase the board.� He probably intended it to be funny rather than malicious. Still, I recognized the uncomfortable insight which his words conveyed. Concrete thinkers tend to be on the “conservative� side of the theological spectrum and often are showered with inordinate levels of scorn by their “liberal� counterparts. It’s hardly a two-way street, for liberals can wear the epithets hurled their way by conservatives much more easily, even with pride. Newsweek, for example, quoted a movie critic’s comment on his round with a devout young conservative: “Feeling like a toxic waste dump (and feeling good about it, mind you), I turned away.� A liberal may feel good about being “wicked,� but no one, not a single soul on earth, liberal or conservative, ever wants to feel stupid. Not ever. If only we could learn that and remember that within the church.... Several personal experiences have shaped my own convictions about the need to nurture the full spectrum of concrete-abstract thinking within the church, most of them growing out of “sanctuary� conversations. In 1981, for example, as an exchange-teacher at Seminar Marienhöhe in Darmstadt, Germany, I was discussing the Adventist sanctuary doctrine with a small class of graduating ministerial students. After we had read Fritz Guy’s article, “Confidence in Salvation: The Meaning of the Sanctuary� (Spectrum 11:2 [Nov. 1980], 44-53), I had noted this statement from early in his essay: We are almost wholly ignorant of the nature of heaven; all we know about it is that it is the transcendent reality where the presence of God is “centered� or “most readily perceived,� and that the difference between earthly and heavenly reality is not absolute, for that would make it impossible for us to understand anything at all about it (p. 45). After making that qualification, however, Guy simply uses the biblical imagery in good American fashion without apology or excuse. But that is not a happy proposition for the abstract-thinking Germans. The more concrete American style tends to be both puzzling and troubling on German soil. The Bible Story, by Uncle Arthur (Maxwell), for example, has been standard fare in American Adventism for decades. But in Germany, I discovered, its many pictures were a source of German discontent. I found the abstract thinking impulse to be so strong in Germany that I begin to think that one of the highest forms of German entertainment must surely be to see how many words can be tucked in between the two parts of the verb! The students reading Guy’s article were cut from that kind of cloth. What that meant in actual practice was that as we worked our way through the article, virtually at every paragraph (or so it seemed to me), they would interrupt with the reminder, “That’s only symbolic; it’s only symbolic.� Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. But… It was a remarkable dialogue. Then one day in conversations at home, I made a comment to my wife that suggested to her that I, too, was moving into a world of high abstraction. When she questioned me, I suddenly realized what was happening. By constant association with abstract-thinking people, I was being nudged in their direction more than I realized. I don’t know how this American-German dialog ultimately played out in the lives of my German students. I suspect that they didn’t realize how much I was in awe of their mental capabilities and their finely tuned abstract logic. In the end, I gained a deeper appreciation of how abstract thinking and concrete thinking could be both a blessing and a threat. I learned to value their abstract thinking, both in its own right and as a corrective to my concrete way of thinking. I hope they gained a corresponding appreciation for the concrete. The opportunity for such mutually corrective experiences is one of the great blessings of belonging to a world church. A year or so later, I was giving a preview series in the Walla Walla College Church of my “Sinai to Golgotha� series, forthcoming in the Adventist Review (December, 1981), and decided to explore the thinking of those attending the series. I had come to suspect that at least a part of our difficulty with 1844 and the investigative judgment lay in the impulse of some, perhaps even many, to view heavenly things in very concrete and earthy terms. So at the end of my presentation on the investigative judgment I passed out slips of paper and asked the believers to indicate on a scale of 1 to 10 how closely they saw their own mental picture of the judgment scene mirroring the actual event in heaven. An exact match would be 1; 10 would be virtually no match at all. Of the some 250 believers in attendance, most put themselves closer to the concrete end of the scale (1 to 3), though there was a generous sprinkling across the full spectrum with some putting themselves at 10, maximum abstraction. But I was struck by the fact that while some 46% put down a 1, indicating a straight one-to-one equivalent between their thinking and the heavenly realm, 54% put down something other than 1. I found that encouraging. Since then, my goal in teaching has been to preserve the abstract-concrete spectrum, while hoping to move the “conservatives� to at least a 2 (at least a small gap between their view and ultimate reality) – and the “liberals� to at least a 9 (at least some contact between our thinking and the heavenly realm). Some months later I was pleased when a devout student in my sanctuary class wrote this note on her final assignment for the term: “Thank you, Dr. T. for letting me keep my pictures.� I wish I could hit a home run like that every time. Finally, if I could speak one more word at our 1844 party, I would say that the Adventist sanctuary message is not a unique “truth� that gives us our reason for existence. Rather, it is a unique story, pointing to common truths that have always been important to God and his people. Paul asked the Corinthian believers: “Am I to come to you with a stick or with love in a spirit of gentleness?� (1 Cor. 4:21, NRSV). In short, shall I frighten you or reassure you? In sanctuary language, that would be: Am I to frighten the careless among you with the threat of judgment? Or shall I reassure the conscientious among you with the promise of Jesus’ eternal ministry on our behalf? In other words, 1844 may simply be another version of that modern aphorism describing the pastor’s work as “Afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.� Could 1844 be as simple as that? I’ve love to explore that option at our next 1844 birthday party.