GYC 2012 Acts: The Revolution Continues

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2012 Seminar: The Reformers Speak to Today's Church

Nick Miller

Scriptural Authority: Solo V. Sola Scriptura?

The Great Controversy: Antique or Heirloom?

Origins: Creation or Theistic Evolution?

Liberty & Morality: What is Today’s Protest?

Sunday Laws: The Only Final Test?

Last Generation Theology: A Different Salvation?

This message was presented at the GYC 2012 conference in Seattle, Washington.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

I think we'll go ahead and get started and reward those that come on time.

I'm sure there'll be others coming over the next few minutes, but I want to start quickly so I can leave time at the end for questions because I enjoy the interaction, finding out what people are thinking and really want to know about.

I'm Nicholas Miller from Andrews University.

I teach at the Seventh-day Adventist Seminary.

I've been in the church history department there for about 6 years now, where I use both.

I have a law degree and practiced as a lawyer for a number of years and had a strong interest in religious liberty.

Andrews University wanted to open up a church state study center, and so they lured me there with a promise of sponsoring me for a PhD in church history, which I always wanted to get.

And so I went and studied the roots of American religious liberty arising out of the Protestant Reformation.

And so that's really my area of specialty, and this presentation and the next 1 are going to deal with these church-state questions, religious liberty questions, and prophetic questions about last day events and religious liberty.

And so I enjoy these topics especially, and I hope you do as well.

But Before I begin, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer and invite the Lord and the Holy Spirit to be with us.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for these meetings and we thank you for the enthusiastic and zealous young people that have come from all over the country.

And it's such a blessing to see even my own children here involved in the meetings and involved in the outreach yesterday and we're grateful for this great peer group that provides the positive pressure to help kids see that it's fun and cool and exciting to do work for Jesus and to help people be ready for his soon coming.

I pray for your spirit with us today as we look at some important issues, both from the past and through prophecy in the future, as to how we can be wise and discerning before the great and terrible day of the Lord, when we know all sorts of deceptions and deceits will come along, and we need to stay close to you and to your word, and to the community of Christ, as we seek to keep a firm hold of the truth.

We pray these things this morning in Jesus' name.

Okay, So we've reached the topic of religious liberty and public morality.

Some of you, I hope, have heard these earlier presentations because they tend to build on each other, going through sola scriptura, the great controversy theme, the moral government of God, which is very directly connected to questions of religious liberty.

The character of God is at the core of Adventism.

And I know there's a number of seminar presenters here that are talking about theodicy and apologetics and the character of God.

And I think that's so appropriate because as Adventists, that is at the core of our theology.

It's not just about being saved, it's about understanding who God is, and then as a Christian, showing that understanding, the goodness and graciousness of God's character to the world that we live in.

It's about showing the truths of God's government to the universe so that our salvation can be accomplished for all time and the universe itself can be put on a safe and eternal footing.

So, we'll talk about religious liberty and morality generally now, the backgrounds of religious liberty in the Protestant Reformation and how that's affected our country today.

And then the next presentation immediately following, we're gonna talk about Sunday laws.

And then this afternoon I'll look at the last generation theology.

If you have questions, feel free to email me at this email address, nicolasatandrews.edu, as well as send a text message if you like to 574-274-5207.

And I will try to get to those questions at the end of my presentation.

Also there have been a number of people who've asked about resources, about these PowerPoints that I'm showing.

I move through them fairly rapidly at times, so it may be hard to write everything down.

But if you would like the PowerPoints, send me an email specifying which ones you would like, and I will send them to you.

And so you can have those PowerPoints, you don't have to write everything down.

Just to recap, the key text, theme text, that I've chosen for the week is this 1 from Hebrews 12.1.

Since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, And let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.

This cloud of witnesses are the faithful of the past, the faithful of all the ages.

They're not alive, and yet Paul exhorts us to consider them, to listen to them.

Not because they're gonna tell us what's true, that they're authorities for us, but they are witnesses to the workings of Jesus Christ.

They're witnesses to the truths of the Bible.

And in dialoguing with them, we can step outside our own limitations, our own time and place.

I was just, there's a Barnes and Noble not far away, and I'm a book lover, and of course, I have to visit every bookstore that I'm near for any period of time, And I came across a fascinating little book that said, You're Not So Smart, which is the kind of book that my wife says that I need to read.

You're Not So Smart, just to sort of remind me.

And it was a fascinating little popular expose of a lot of sociological, psychological studies, making the point that while we think we're reasonable and rational and make decisions based on reason, that much of the time our subconscious is operating, that we make decisions based on emotion, We make decisions based on visual and verbal cues that we're not even aware of.

Some very profound studies about people being shown objects and then being given tests.

And they will give different answers on the test depending on what objects they've been shown.

And there seems to be no connection between the 2, and they think they're doing this rationally.

But you come away with an understanding that we need each other.

A Christian community needs the Holy Spirit and each other to make themselves aware of your own subconscious and unconscious biases.

We can't overemphasize this community theme.

Another group of tests showed that if you're on your own, you're more likely, if you're in a room, if somebody calls for help or if something strange happens, smoke starts rising, if you're on your own, you're very likely to respond to it.

If there's 2 or 3 of you, you're somewhat less likely to respond to it.

And if there's a large crowd, you're almost likely not to respond to it.

There's like this group apathy that happens.

It's like, well, this is somebody else's problem, somebody else will help.

And the point of the article is you have to learn to act on your own and assert yourself as well.

So we need each other, but we also need to think for ourselves and be convicted of truth for ourselves.

1 other thing I'll mention for those that weren't here, in talking about this need for studying in community, we talked about the 2 influences on Adventism in the 20th century especially.

From the larger culture, the larger Christian community, Liberalism on the left, the emphasis on experience, over proposition, the rejection of propositional truths in the Bible.

And then fundamentalism on the right, which is almost the opposite, a complete focus on orthodoxy and not much attention necessarily given to experience.

And that Adventism is neither 1 or the other, but cares about both things.

It cares about truth, but it also realizes faith and the personal experience of faith is important.

In each of the topics we've looked at, I've generally discovered there's not just a right view and a wrong view.

There's actually usually 2 unhealthy extremes and the right view lies somewhere in the middle, not as a compromise, but as a balance of competing concerns.

And in this area of church and state, we find that same thing.

And in fact, I'm gonna start out by talking about the dilemmas of moral legislation.

As Adventists, we've tended to focus on the separation of church and state.

That this is important because we believe that in the future there will be Sunday laws and that the church, the larger Christian church will attempt to use the state to coerce in matters of conscience regarding days of worship.

So this has made us very sensitive to the point where often some among us will say you just can't legislate morality.

It's funny, in this area, the liberals and the fundamentalists sometimes kind of overlap because you'll get the liberals who say, well look, all morality is personal and relative.

You know, what's true and good for you is fine for you, but don't impose it on me.

And therefore, you know, you can believe what you want, but let's not enforce it on others.

We should only legislate against directly measurable, usually physical harms.

And so the liberals will say, pornography, abortion, same sex marriage, these things, we should allow all this because it's trying to impose our morality on others.

Well, funnily enough, the fundamentalists will have a somewhat different view.

They'll say, yeah, there is a right and a wrong.

The Bible prohibits certain sexual practices, gay marriage, pornography, elective abortion, and racial discrimination.

And we shouldn't do these things in the church.

But as these are moral decisions, and there's a separation of church and state, that it would violate the separation of church and state and improperly involve the church in politics to get involved politically on these questions.

And so ironically, while they have different personal philosophies, the kind of liberals and fundamentalists often both press for non-involvement on these political questions.

Now there is these both these have had an influence on Adventism, both of these positions, but they are a product of 20th century influences and weren't found in our early Adventist pioneers.

And the clearest example is Ellen White and her involvement in temperance reform and prohibition of alcohol.

Ellen White understood clearly the importance of the separation of church and state.

She talks about it in the great controversy.

She spoke to her largest audiences in her life, to non-adventist groups, up to 50, 000 people, talking about the importance of both temperance reform, not drinking alcohol, choosing yourself not to drink it, but also arguing that people should go out and vote for laws and vote for political candidates who would pass laws outlawing alcohol.

She did the same thing in the area of racial discrimination and slavery.

That we should oppose unjust laws that required the return of slaves to slave masters and we should work for the abolition of slavery.

And we should oppose discrimination as well.

Now, the Adventist pioneers then understood that while the separation of church and state was important institutionally, and the state should stay out of spiritual matters, that there were moral concerns that the state should be involved with.

Series

GYC 2012 Seminar: The Reformers Speak to Today's Church

Liberty & Morality: What is Today’s Protest?

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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