General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 59th Session

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General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Yes, Creation!

Kwabena Donkor

Evolutionary thought, Spiritualism and the End of Time

Lee Spencer

How Many Dinosaurs Were On the Ark?

Ariel Roth

Some scientific data that favors a recent creation

Stan Hudson

The Biblical creation is central to the local church

Greg King

Is Biblical Creation Passé?

Nikolaus Satelmajer

Rollin Shoemaker

Sabbath and Creation

Paleontology and the Bible: Science in action

John Baldwin

Why Does a Good Creator Permit Evil?

JoAnn Davidson

...and it WAS good

Jim Gibson

Lions in the Garden of Eden

Richard Davidson

Does Genesis Really Teach a Recent, Literal, Seven-Day Creation Week and a Global Flood?

Tim Standish

DNA and Design

Jacques Doukhan

Creation, the Heart of SDA Theology

How to share creation in outreach on secular campuses

Do millions of years solve the problem?

Ed Zinke

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Ronny Nalin

Dealing with uncertainty

Ted N.C. Wilson

God’s Literal, Six-day, Recent Creation--The Church’s Position

Creation and Evolution: A brief history

Clifford Goldstein

Seventh-day Darwinians

I've been looking forward to joining you folks here in the Yes Creation presentations for a long time.

Unfortunately, I've been tied up in a few other things for most of the time here, but it's good to be here right now.

I'd like to give credit to my son, David, for quite a bit of the artwork that you will see in this presentation.

And Also I'd like to say that motivation for the presentation, I have 7 grandchildren.

And my motivation is I want them to grow up in the Seventh-day Adventist church and I want them to be committed to the Seventh-day Adventist message.

And so hopefully this will contribute to that.

But what is Adventism and how does Adventism relate to theistic evolution?

Now obviously in 20 minutes we can't cover that topic in detail, but we can look at at least a few aspects, is basically world views that are worlds apart.

You know, for some, Seventh-day Adventism is simply knowing the 28 fundamentals.

And they kind of feel, well, you know, if we take 1 out, it doesn't really matter.

Doesn't really affect the rest of the doctrines.

And I think that's probably a short-sighted view of Seventh-day Adventism, because Seventh-day Adventist doctrine is integrated.

And it all has Scripture as its foundation.

And if you begin to tear 1 part of it apart, you begin to tear all of it apart.

Let's assume that we're on the oceanfront.

You can see it reflected in the sand as it's refreshed by the waves.

The water is splashing up on the cliffs on each side.

I'm sure each of you would prefer to be there right now instead of listening to this presentation.

We're sitting in the same place, the same beach, the same cliffs, the same waves, but we take the sun out of the picture.

You're looking at a completely different picture, aren't you?

Well, that's what happens when you begin to take even 1 doctrine out of Seventh-day Adventist theology.

And we'll try to point out in just a few ways how that happens when you put theistic evolution in place of a major doctrine of scripture.

Semantic Adventism, obviously this isn't an all-inclusive statement, but it is a conversion to God and his worldview presented in the Bible.

The Bible provides the foundational perspective from which we understand God, ourselves, and our universe.

This worldview challenges all other worldviews, including the Western worldview, I should add.

Now, what are some of the things that this worldview, what are some of the places where it is different from the secular worldview in which we live in our society?

Absolutely central to the biblical worldview is that God has revealed himself and that we can understand God and the world around us because of God's self-revelation.

God revealed himself to Adam and Eve, explaining their environment.

How else would they have known how to deal with the tree and the center of the garden?

He revealed himself to patriarchs, prophets, who communicated his message to us in the Bible.

He revealed himself on Mount Sinai in his own handwriting in Jesus Christ.

The major issue in the Great Controversy, and I'm using that word broadly as well as speaking of the book, The Great Controversy, is how do we relate to the word of God?

Will we live by the word of God as Jesus did, or will we choose our own independent resources, rational, empirical, existential, financial, politically, political, whatever they may be, as did Eve.

So we have the example of Christ in the wilderness, dealing with temptation, answering from the Word of God, Eve in the Garden of Eden, dealing with temptation, answering with empirical and philosophical arguments.

Another key feature of Adventist worldview and biblical worldview is that God acts in history.

He created our environment and life on earth in 6 days.

He interacted with Adam and Eve and Cain.

He brought about the global flood and saved Noah and his family in the ark.

He interacted with Abraham and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

He brought down fire from heaven on Mount Carmel.

All of this in fulfillment of prophecy, which, by the way, is also often a different world view than that of theistic evolution.

He is ministering for us in the heavenly sanctuary.

He will busily, personally come again to take us home with him.

And then just as he created this earth initially, he will recreate a new heaven and earth in which dwells righteousness.

That is the God who acts decisively in our history.

He also acts decisively in our personal lives.

We can know him because he has revealed himself in scripture and he acts in history, including our lives.

There's another difference, an important difference.

You know, Adventism is built in part upon a very strong educational system.

That was part of who we were very early in our history.

Adventism strongly affirms the ethic of raising our children in harmony with and in allegiance to God's word.

This is the solemn responsibility of parents, fellow church members, teachers, and church leaders.

Theistic evolution comes out of a different worldview.

It comes out of the air of the Enlightenment thinking, which gives its allegiance to freedom of thought, totally autonomous from God and his word, the Bible.

And So freedom, in a sense, becomes God, rather than the God who has revealed himself in the Bible.

And for some, if God exists, God himself is subject to the principle of freedom, rather than God having been the source of freedom.

You know, many say God is a very big God, and God provides an umbrella for all, and I agree.

God does provide an umbrella large enough to cover every group, whether it's Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, educated or uneducated.

But some are asking the church for an umbrella large enough to cover all of the gods.

Coming back to the ethics, this is really a crucial difference in ethics and allegiance.

Tears families apart, churches and institutions, and hinders the spread of the 3 angels' messages that also saps the church of resources meant to strengthen it.

There's also a difference in method and theology.

And I'd like to illustrate this in part by going through very quickly some of the basic differences in method and theology that have taken place historically.

In the early church and in the Middle Ages, reality imposed meaning on the mind of man.

And theologians accepted that concept of reality and used it in their process for doing theology.

And so the mind of man was the film upon which the exterior world registered itself.

But the formula was not just this external world that imposed itself through Aristotle and Plato, but it was also the Bible and.

Circle it, underline it, put a yellow marker through it.

Reason, tradition, church, church councils, the pope, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

That was absolutely drilled into my mind when I went to Catholic University to work on a degree.

Back to Menu

Series

Yes, Creation!

Theistic evolution and the end of Adventism

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Plenary

Will We Believe?

43m

Mind Over Matter

44m

A Sure Foundation

31m

GYC SE 2011 Seminar: Devotional Life

The Undoing of the Saints: A Testimony

43m

Three Angels’ Messages and Justification

50m

Dare to be a Daniel

03 Final Character

45m

There Is A Promise In It

23m

Experience The Power

An Equal and Opposite Reaction

44m

God in Harm’s Way

39m

Freedom From Fear 2006

Who is the Devil?

57m

Suffering, The Story of God’s Presence

39m

Summary and Conclusion

39m

Sound Doctrine