GYC West 2014: I Am The Conflict Continues

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GYC West

Facing the Omega

Dave Fiedler

1. Lessons from the Alpha

Father, we ask your presence on this campground for all that's done and especially just now in this 1 room.

We pray that you will guide and direct our thoughts and my words and help us to come away with something of value and practical value for your cause, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Let me start off with just a little bit of an overview because there are 6 sessions, which is, that's an unusually large number for breakout sessions.

But human nature is human nature, and I know you'll probably wanna, you know, look at some of the others along the way.

So let me just tell you what's gonna happen so you can make your best choices, how's that?

What we're talking about, you could basically lump it under the general topic of the emerging church, as 1 title is put on things, mysticism, the Omega of Apostasy, the Alpha and the Omega of Apostasy, pantheism, panentheism.

That's 1 of the strokes of genius of those who are administering this kind of stuff is they have more names and they switch names about every 6 months.

So, things started off as the emerging church and then it became the emergent church and then it's just simply emergent.

And I think that name's probably gone by now, anyhow, if you were really on the in circles, they probably don't even use it anymore, so I don't know what they're calling it now.

We have 6 sessions, and what I am not interested in is a simple rehashing and the rehearsing of the sins of the church and all of its members.

I find that possibly useful at times, but very depressing.

And so I don't want to really spend my time with that.

We will have 1 session where that's basically the focus, is kind of going through the more recent history, because if you're going to implement any sort of an effective response, you do have to understand what's going on.

So I think that'd be the fourth session if I remember right.

To me, if there's any 1 thing that I try to bring to this discussion that some others may not perhaps, it's a little bit more of a historical sense.

I can't start talking about the emergent church without going back and talking about Kellogg first, okay?

And only a fool will take a test and get a C minus and take the same test again without studying the test that he bombed.

So my theory is if, if we are in fact facing the omega, and I can't guarantee that, I think it's a distinct possibility.

I'm not in a position to guarantee anything, but I think it's a possibility.

So, but if we are facing the omega, to do so without learning the lessons from the alpha is just plain dumb.

So anyhow, that's why our first 1 is called Lessons from the Alpha.

So, but, even more than understanding the past and the present and realizing how fearful the situation is, and it actually is, it's a very dreary, nasty situation, okay?

Probably more so than most of you have any idea.

We have to find the right way to respond to it.

As I said last night, we responded to Kellogg 110 years ago, and we preserved the relative purity of our doctrine, which was important, but we lost the right arm of the message.

And Ellen White says that when that happens, it places the worst evil on the churches.

And I don't really want to do another century under the worst evil.

The last 1, last 2 I think are how to respond and that sort of thing, if I remember right.

Hands down the most intriguing character Adventism has ever produced.

Just if I wanted, if I didn't believe in the state of the dead the way I do, and I just wanted something, an interesting afternoon, I'd like to talk to Dr.

Of course, Ellen White is in a unique position as a messenger of the Lord and she's fascinating for all those reasons but just by matter of personality and involvement and whatnot, he's the guy.

This I don't know when this would have been, probably he was I'm guessing, what do you think, 28, something like that, give or take.

If he's 28 years old, that would put it in 1880, 4 years after he took over the management of the, what was known as the Western Health Reform Institute, and he immediately changed the name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

Made the word up in the process, and that's just kind of the way he was.

Well, so if you're 24, 25, male, physician, head of a medical institution.

What do you think you're thinking about in your spare time?

Kellogg had picked up his second MD degree, long story there, we don't have time for it right now, he came back to Battle Creek and he noticed a young lady, new to Battle Creek.

She'd started off as a typesetter at the Review, but now she was a copy editor, which is, that's a, you know, Somebody's got something on the ball there to be a copy editor, okay?

She was attractive, The little ringlets were particularly stylish in those days.

She was the kind of young lady that a young gentleman might notice, shall we say.

And then it was the end of summer, and he went off to New York to do 2 more years of medical school at Bellevue Medical Center in New York City, the premier institution in the country at the time.

But the way these things work sometimes is a little cumbersome because there was another young man in town who at about the same time had also noticed this same young lady.

And at the end of that same summer, he went off to California with his father.

And so we have the young lady there, Mary Kelsey in Battle Creek, and we have letters Going back and forth from east coast and west coast to Michigan.

Now I heard a story once, purely local Battle Creek native gossip type of a story.

Impossible, totally impossible to authenticate.

But the story is that the young man on the west coast had an advantage over the young man on the east coast.

And that is that 1 of his friends worked in the post office.

That would be cheap, really, really cheap.

And I'd like to believe that the young man on the West Coast knew nothing about it if anything of the sort ever happened.

But in course of events, after some months of correspondence and appropriate behavior and due consideration.

Mary Kelsey went out to California and after some further period of time was married and became Mrs.

William Clarence White, as in Willie White's wife.

John Kellogg had grown up a number of years in the White home, and Edson and Willie were almost like brothers to him.

But from that point on, John and Willie really never hit it off so much.

Kellogg was a go-getter And 1 of his basic assumptions was that second place is losing.

And so in process of time, another young lady showed up in Battle Creek.

She was a cook, good cook, and a poet, and a musician, and a writer, and a poet.

She was everything that Mary Kelsey was plus.

2. Working the Problem...

Let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Father, we ask again your direction, your wisdom.

Lord, we are dealing with topics that will result in the loss and the saving of souls.

So we pray that you would make us wise workmen in your cause.

You know, sometimes life doesn't go the way you want it to go and you gotta work the problem.

What should we have done, et cetera, et cetera, in dealing with the Kellogg situation?

Well, the first thing that would have been good would have been to spot it when it first came up.

If you go looking for hard, tangible, historic proof of the introduction of pantheism, the easiest place to say, okay, this is probably where we can call it the beginning, would have been the general conference session of 1897.

Comments were made there, I believe by Kellogg and also by Wagner.

I don't remember whether Prescott got in on that or not.

You know, every summer there was the camp meeting circuit and you kind of, you know, you kind of get the feeling that okay if the guy said this at this general conference session and 2 years later he said the same thing then probably you have 2 summers in between where he was saying it on the camp meeting circuit.

Well Those sermons and things are not as well recorded for us, so it's hard to say.

But the very first thing would be to Be able to spot problems when they come up.

That's what Ellen White most wished, I guess, or most lamented that hadn't been done, is catching the problem at the beginning.

There's not a profound order to this necessarily, but each 1 has something to note.

Scientific, spiritualistic sentiments Representing the creator as an essence pervading all nature have been given to our people and have been received even by some who have had a long experience as teachers in the word of God.

The results of this insidious devising will break out, what?

We have gone actually a rather long stretch without seeing real blatant examples of it until some of the more recent manifestations, shall we say.

Multiple things I've seen in just my short time, I've seen different things show up.

I'm like, wasn't this taken care of and well soundly taken care of?

Your short time would be the modern manifestation within the last 20 years.

Before that, before that, you know, last, I don't know, I suppose if you wanted to say really visible, probably, you know, what?

But anyhow, but we didn't see much of it for several decades.

I'll tell you a story about that in a little bit.

But I want you to notice this, that it's again and again.

When the devil's got a weapon that works, he doesn't, why should he trade it on a new 1, right?

There is danger that the false sentiments expressed in the books they have been reading, and this is talking about people that go off studying and associating and reading things that they would be better off not reading, Okay.

There is danger the false sentiments expressed in the books they've been reading will sometimes be interwoven by our ministers, teachers, and editors with their arguments, discourses, and publications under the belief that they are the same in principle as the teachings of the Spirit of truth.

The book Living Temple is an illustration of this work, the writer of which declared in its support that its teachings were the same as those found in the writings of Mrs.

You know, the first time I ran into anything like this was 1985 in an Adventist setting.

And I really didn't have a clue what it was.

I said, there's something weird about that.

No, no, no, no, it's the same stuff you read about in mind, character, and personality.

But I was young and stupid, and I didn't know.

It was a gut level more that made me pull back.

But you know, actually, I said 85 and I'm wrong, because the first time I actually ran into it was 1976, 1975, 76, when I was still in academy.

I had an academy teacher who probably without a clue what he was doing was using guided imagery and it didn't even register there was a problem at that point.

Again and again we should be called to meet the influence of men who are studying sciences of satanic origin through which Satan is working to make a non-entity of God and of Christ, okay?

So again and again, it's gonna keep coming back, and we have to meet this.

That's kind of the question we want to be looking at here.

The sentiments in living temple regarding the personality of God have been received even by men who have had a long experience in the truth.

When such men consent to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we are no longer to regard the subject as a matter to be treated with the greatest delicacy.

That those whom we thought sound in the faith should have failed to discern the specious, deadly influence of the science of evil should alarm us as nothing else has alarmed us.

There is a time to not deal with the greatest delicacy.

But we can easily get mixed up with that.

In Christ's life, there were several times when it was inappropriate to deal with the greatest delicacy.

It's difficult to flip a table over delicately.

It's difficult to say, you know, you vipers, delicately.

And yet, when he pronounced the woes on the scribes and the Pharisees, she says he did it with tears in his eyes.

So it's real easy to read into this, you know, okay.

Take the gloves off, time to come out swinging.

Well, the word is the double-edged sword in itself.

It is something that cannot be treated as a small matter that men who have had so much light and such clear evidence as to the genuineness of the truth we hold should become unsettled and led to accept spiritualistic theories regarding the personality of God.

I'm gonna have to make a quick switch here and so you're gonna lose the view of this, but I want to read something else to you.

What, I guess I mentioned it already, but you know, we kind of have an awkward situation in 1 regard, because you know, Ellen White clearly tells us don't read Living Temple, you know, she says just don't touch it.

She says never suffer yourself to open the covers of a questionable book.

Well, That's great advice and I try to follow it.

But it does mean you have to be a little creative to know which books are questionable, you know.

I mean, how do you know it's questionable if you haven't read it, right?

And you're always going to come under the accusation, well, how come you can criticize it, you haven't even read it, right?

Well, of course I haven't read it, the Lord told me not to.

So that's a good reason to give some criticism too.

3. “The Way is Prepared, and Disease Invited...”

Give us an understanding that we'll see more, at least, to the root of issues and help us to be wise in how we go about dealing with them we pray in Jesus name.

Okay the way is prepared and disease invited.

And it says disease doesn't come just as an accident.

Disease comes because the way is prepared and disease is invited.

I'm going to ask you to bear with me a little bit with an imperfect illustration.

And naturally I don't defend any of the faulty aspects of it.

But nonetheless, consider the illustration a little bit if you would.

The church is the body of Christ and the church can be healthy and the church can be sick.

And sometimes we prepare the way for disease and we invited it.

Elwhaite says This little phrase a fair number of times, as in the natural world, everybody know how to finish it?

So in the spiritual world, as in the natural world, so in the spiritual world.

And here's the statement, disease never comes without a cause.

The way is prepared and disease invited by disregard of the laws of health.

Many suffer in transgression of, in consequence of the transgression of their parents.

While they are not responsible for what their parents have done.

It is nevertheless their duty to ascertain what are and what are not violations of the laws of health.

They should avoid the wrong habits of their parents and by correct living place themselves in better conditions.

So now here's the thought that I want to just kind of float out there.

And like I say, it's not a perfect illustration, I understand that.

The disease which now afflicts the Adventist church, I would suggest, is something that we have prepared the way for and invited in.

And it won't do us much good to address the disease without addressing the underlying causes.

Okay, so all I'm saying, like I said, the illustration has some merit, it's a little weak.

But what I'm saying is that there are often reasons behind the things that we see.

Disease is an effort of nature to free the system from conditions that result from a violation of the laws of health.

In case of sickness, the cause should be ascertained.

Unhealthful conditions should be changed, wrong habits corrected.

Then Nature is to be assisted in her effort to expel impurities and to reestablish right conditions in the system.

Okay, well in my little metaphorical illustration, I would have to modify some things here.

Heresy, I don't know, it's an effort of nature.

I think the devil gets quite involved actually.

But nonetheless, the idea that I'm suggesting is that we have missed the boat in some ways.

We have missed the mark, a little more biblical expression.

And what we're reaping now is the natural result.

What silver man sows, that shall he also reap.

They reap the wind, or they sow the wind, they reap the whirlwind.

There's some really interesting things in the natural world.

I have a whole little sermon which I will not go into at length for you right now, on the laws of the harvest.

And the truth is that what you sow, you will reap.

And it doesn't do much good to, as the old saying goes, you sow your wild oats and pray for a crop failure.

The basic truth of agriculture has to be that you're gonna get back more than you put in the ground.

If you plant 1 bushel of wheat and your harvest is 1 bushel of wheat, A, you're not feeding yourself, and B, You're not going to keep that thing going, right?

So you can always expect that the results are going to be more intense than the apparent cause.

You may or may not like the illustration.

The cause should be ascertained in the case of heresy just as much as in the case of disease.

Unhealthful conditions should be changed.

And then again, nature, I think this nature down here would be more along the lines of God, whereas this nature up here is probably more along the lines of the devil, when we're talking heresy at least.

You'll notice the title on this slide here is the Hills of Goboa.

You remember Ellen White's comment about how we had in the 1870s and 80s, we had preached the law, the law, the law, until we were as dry as the hills of Goboa.

I'm suggesting that we've done something a little different that left us just as dry.

Everywhere there is a tendency to substitute the work of organizations for individual effort.

Human wisdom tends to consolidation, to centralization, to the building up of great churches and institutions.

Multitudes leave to institutions and organizations the work of benevolence.

They excuse themselves from contact with the world, and their hearts grow cold.

They become self-absorbed and unimpressable.

Love for God and man dies out of the soul.

I don't have them all in here, but you know, she says it's good to support worthy causes with your finances.

If that's all you do, you will die spiritually.

Somewhere along the line, you have to be involved with people.

And I'm going to suggest that partially, largely, I would say, as a result of the feelings, the emotions, the choices which came out of our conflict with Dr.

3 years after he was disfellowshipped, we were in the process of trying to establish Loma Linda as an institution and decide what to do with it and all.

And I won't go into the details it's in my book De Sozo but we took a particular turn the Lord opened the way I believe he changed the laws of the state of California to give us a blank check on what we were going to do with Loma Linda.

And we chose instead to let someone else write the check.

That makes it sound like they were paying for it.

We let someone else write our mission statement is what happened.

It wasn't all bad, but it wasn't all that God designed it to be.

He can, again, take it or leave it, feel free to differ with me.

But largely out of that twist of events, seemingly totally separate from anything else that we're focusing on here, we headed this direction, Organizations.

Partially it was cultural, at least in the United States and Canada.

I'm not sure the rest of the world, you know, I'm not a world traveler enough to know so I can't argue for that.

But there was a time period when, just from my reading of accounts from back in the day, it was really, really cool to be a member of an organization.