Greetings from the Five Cities Region of California.
Evangelist Evans Ochieng arrived in Malawi yesterday to visit, follow up with some of the newly baptized, teach, and to check out various matters and issues there.
Over here, I was the guest on another podcast on Tuesday as we continue to go through doors which Jesus has opened up for us (cf. Revelation 3:7-9).
Donation Receipts
On the administrative side of things, we sent out contribution receipts to our financial supporters in the USA this week for those we had mailing addresses for. We tend to send these out twice per year. If you did not receive a receipt for whatever reason and want one, simply send me an email and we will strive to take care of that.
Our income for calendar year 2025 is currently down a little from 2024.
Jesus said:
37 … “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. 38 Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.” (Matthew 9:37-38)
The need for the harvest is truly here now. Please pray for more truly converted laborers for the harvest.
Seventh-day Adventists
Last week, the Seventh-day Adventists voted to replace their president Ted Wilson with Erton Köhler, who is a Brazil-born pastor in their church.
Many people in the Continuing Church of God in Africa once were part of the SDA church.
Those who left it, realize many of the scriptural and other issues it has.
Because the SDAs go to church on Saturday as well as avoid biblically unclean meat consumption, some have thought that the SDA church is quite similar to groups like the Continuing Church of God.
The SDA church claims to be Protestant, and it basically is. However, the Continuing Church of God (CCOG) is NOT Protestant (see our free ebook Hope of Salvation: How the Continuing Church of God Differs from Protestantism) nor do we vote in leaders.
Also, unlike the CCOG, the SDAs changed on matters such as the use of crosses and the Godhead.
Regarding crosses, Ellen White wrote:
Papists place crosses upon their churches, upon their altars, and upon their garments. Everywhere is seen the insignia of the cross. Everywhere it is outwardly honored and exalted. But the teachings of Christ are buried beneath a mass of senseless traditions, false interpretations, and rigorous exactions. … The worship of images and relics, the invocation of saints, and the exaltation of the pope, are devices of Satan to attract the minds of the people from God and from His Son. (White EG. The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan. Guttenberg Project edition, p. 590)
How was that interpreted?
Historically our Adventist church viewed the cross as a pagan symbol … (Bacchiochi S. Is the Cross a Pagan Symbol? Endtime Issues Newsletter, 124, 2005, p. 17)
But that changed and since no later than 1997 a cross containing logo has been in use by the official SDA church.
Some have indicated part of the reason that church did that was to make the SDAs more acceptable to other Protestants and Rome (cf. Nyazika P. The Final Call. Lulu.com, pp. 131, 176).
The SDAs also changed their view on the Godhead.
Notice what James White (the husband of Ellen White) wrote in the 1800s:
The Father is the greatest…The Son is next in authority…The inexplicable Trinity that makes the godhead three in one and one in three, is bad enough…(Quoted in Wiebe E. Who Is the Adventist Jesus? Published by Xulon Press, 2005, p. 167).
…the Trinity does away with the personality of God…(ibid, p. 88).
The greatest fault we can find in the Reformers is, the Reformers stopped reforming. Had they gone on, and onward, till they had left the last vestige of the Papacy behind such as the natural immortality, sprinkling, the trinity, and Sundaykeeping, the church would now be free her unscriptural errors (Ibid, p. 89).
So James White considered the trinity to be in the same category as Sundaykeeping–do SDAs realize this?
Here are some admissions concerning Ellen White and the trinity from The Ellen White Estate, Inc. official website:
Ellen White never used the term “trinity”…at times she used the pronoun “it” when referring to the Holy Spirit (The Ellen G. White Estate. Questions and Answers About Ellen G. White: The Godhead. http://www.whiteestate.org/issues/faq-egw.html#faq-section-c2 viewed 7/30/08).
In a book co-written with James White, SDA pioneer Joseph Bates wrote:
Respecting the trinity, I concluded that is was an impossibility for me to believe…(Bates J, White J. The Early Life and Later Experience and Labors of Elder Joseph Bates. Published by Steam Press of the Seventh-day adventist publishing association, 1878, p. 210).
SDA pioneer J. Waggoner wrote:
The inconsistencies of Trinitarians, which must be pointed out to free the Scripture doctrine of the Atonement from reproaches under which it has too long lain, are the necessary outgrowth of their system of theology. No matter how able are the writers to whom we shall refer, they could never free themselves from inconsistencies without correcting their theology…“To the contrary, the advocates of that doctrine really fall into the difficulty which they seem anxious to avoid. Their difficulty consists in this: They take the denial of a trinity to be equivalent to a denial of the divinity of Christ. Were that the case, we should cling to the doctrine of a trinity as tenaciously as any can; but it is not the case. They who have read our remarks on the death of the Son of God know that we firmly believe in the divinity of Christ; but we cannot accept the idea of a trinity, as it is held by Trinitarians, without giving up our claim on the dignity of the sacrifice made for our redemption. (J. H. Waggoner, ‘The Atonement in Light of Nature and Revelation’, 1884 Edition, chapter ‘Doctrine of a Trinity Subversive of the Atonement’)
SDA scholar Samuele Bacchiocchi wrote:
The truth is that our Adventist church would not be here today, had it not been for the prophetic guidance of Ellen White. She played a leading role in shaping our message and mission. For example, we noted in the newsletter no. 150 the role of Ellen White in leading our church to accept the Doctrine of the Trinity (ENDTIME ISSUES NEWSLETTER No. 153.”The Pre-Advent Judgment – Part I”).
He also wrote:
The doctrine of the Trinity has been under the crossfire of controversy during much of Christian history. Our Adventist Church has not been exempted from the controversy. In the newly released book The Trinity: Its Implications for Life and Thought (Review and Herald, 2002), Prof. Jerry Moon, one of the three authors, offers a most informative historical survey of the gradual evolution of Adventist pioneers from anti-Trinitarian to Trinitarian beliefs…
It is unfortunate that those apologetic endeavors often resulted in heretical anti-trinitarian teachings that have plagued Christianity until our time. In fact, most of today’s anti-trinitarian heresies found in such religious movements as the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Unitarians, and liberal theologians, trace their roots to the early church (Bacchiocchi S. The Importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity. ENDTIME ISSUES NEWSLETTER NO. 147. 5/11/06).
The above is probably not a good use of the term “liberal theologians.” The normal definition (as Dr. Bacchiocchi must have known) is that liberal theologians are normally those that discount original teachings–that is what the SDAs themselves have sadly done. The truth is that the SDAs were once anti-Trinitarian. This is a significant difference between the COGs and the SDAs as the Church of God has always been non-Trinitarian (please see the article Binitarian View). (For quotes from SDA scholars on what the SDAs once believed and now believe on the Godhead, please also see the article titled Did the True Church Ever Teach a Trinity?).
The SDA Church was not just anti-Trinitarian, it was also binitarian/semi-arian.
Another SDA scholar, G. Pfandl, wrote this about the Semi-Arians (a title that somewhat applies to those in the COGs):
While the Seventh day Adventist Church today espouses the doctrine of the Trinity, this has not always been so. The evidence from a study of Adventist history indicates that from the earliest years of our church to the 1890’s a whole stream of writers took an Arian or semi Arian position…
Semi Arianism…They rejected the Arian view that Christ was created and had a different nature from God (anomoios dissimilar), but neither did they accept the Nicene Creed which stated that Christ was “of one substance (homoousios) with the Father.” Semi Arians taught that Christ was similar ( homoios) to the Father, or of like substance (homoiousios), but still subordinate” (Pfandl, Gerhard. THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY AMONG ADVENTISTS. Biblical Research Institute Silver Spring, MD June 1999, http://www.macgregorministries.org/seventh_day_adventists/trinity.html, 5/12/06).
A number of Adventist authors today who are opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity are trying to resurrect the views of our early pioneers on these issues. They are urging the church to forsake the “Roman doctrine” of the Trinity and to accept again the semi-Arian position of our pioneers…
J. N. Loughborough, in response to the question “What serious objection is there to the doctrine of the Trinity?” wrote, “There are many objections which we might urge, but on account of our limited space we shall reduce them to the three following: 1. It is contrary to common sense. 2. It is contrary to scripture. 3. Its origin is Pagan and fabulous.”
And R. F. Cottrell, in an article on the Trinity, stated:
To hold the doctrine of the trinity is not so much an evidence of evil intention as of intoxication from that wine of which all the nations have drunk. The fact that this was one of the leading doctrines, if not the very chief, upon which the bishop of Rome was exalted to the popedom, does not say much in its favor…
The rise of the Trinity doctrine in our church was the outworking of a slow process that occurred over many years. It was not imposed on the church arbitrarily; it evolved slowly from within. The first positive reference to the Trinity in Adventist literature appeared in the Bible Students’ Library series in 1892…
Most early Adventist pioneers were anti-Trinitarians… In 1931 the Adventist Yearbook contained a statement of twenty-two fundamental beliefs, one of which was the Trinity (Pfandl G. The Doctrine of the Trinity Among Seventh-day Adventists. Journal of the Adventist Theological Society, 17/1 (Spring 2006): 160–179).
What the above quotes leave out is that the anti-Trinitarian writers lost out because Ellen White allegedly published a pamphlet in 1897 declaring the Holy Spirit “the third person of the Godhead” (the SDAs were “Semi-Arians” before this–though they did not tend to use that term). The truth about the Holy Spirit can be found in the article Did Early Christians Think the Holy Spirit Was A Separate Person in a Trinity?
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