Leaving Home

At this point in my journey, I was faced with an intersection of belief. I could go down the wider road to New Covenantville, where quite a few of my friends were already headed or residing. On this road, Paul’s words superseded the rest of the Bible, I would throw out the law of God as being required or even necessary, and I would head to the nearest church of the Northland/Willow Creek/Saddleback variety. If I chose this route, I would also need to try to “close Pandora’s box” and disregard/forget everything I had learned about Paul’s stigmata, his demonic “thorn” and his false NuGospel. Or I could take the other, less populated road. I could choose to reject the antinomianism prescribed by Paul and look at the TRUE law of God as a blessing; just like Jesus himself did.

Many Adventist theologians and other conservative Christian scholars who I discussed these issues with acknowledged that Paul indeed appeared to be offering contradictory advice. But because of his inclusion in the authoritative Word of God, the underlying advice was to just accept what he was saying and attempt to reconcile his problem passages as best I could.

Unfortunately, the counsel I received from these discussions ended up being an exercise in confusion. It didn’t help the situation to know that many thousands of scholars before me had recognized the problems with Paul, but had chosen to do nothing about it. It seemed to me that Paul really needed to be thoroughly and critically scrutinized—but no one within Christendom’s leadership seemed willing to do so. Eventually, I realized that what I was doing was not questioning God, but rather questioning Paul’s canonization into Scripture by the Roman Catholic Church.

I was extremely distressed when I started to have doubts about Paul’s message. Who can describe the anguish, grief, remorse, and anger of a Christian who realizes that the foundation of Christianity that they have built their doctrine on has some serious cracks in it?

There was an enormous spiritual intersection ahead. Which way should I go?

The weekend I really faced these facts and contradictions, I was so shocked and dismayed that I skipped church. I lay woodenly in my bed, sobbing brokenly. It felt like someone near and dear to me had died; in fact, this situation seemed even worse, because my own now-shaky faith no longer had a “Thus saith the Lord” to depend on. What was I to do now? Where was I to go? How could I live without the support and comfort of my spiritual home and the familiar tradition I had depended on my whole life?

I did not realize it at the time, but many other Adventists had questions about Adventism as well; in fact, it takes more than the fingers on my two hands to count how many close and devout friends have exited the Adventist Church because they can no longer reconcile what they have been taught with what they read in the Bible.

This exodus of members is not an isolated trend. In 2005, the SDA Church reported astounding membership losses. In spite of the fact that 5 million new believers joined the church during the 5-year period of 2000-2004, over 1.4 million members left the church during that same period.[1]

If you ask the great majority of those who have left Adventism what their reasons are, the answers will be nearly unanimous: earnest Christian people are logically leaving Adventism because of Adventism’s obvious contradictions with Paul.[2] Paul alone creates more contradiction within the rest of the Bible than any other Biblical figure (writer). Paul contradicts the words of the Messiah and Paul contradicts the prophets as well. We previously looked at such a contradiction between Mathew 5:17 versus Ephesians 2:15. These contradictions are not unknown within Christianity, but they are generally spun and smoothly marketed as “the mystery of God” or “two sides of the same coin”.

What usually happens within a church that correctly attempts to honor God’s Law in general and the Sabbath in particular is that intelligent Christian people end up recognizing Paul’s contradiction and are then logically forced to choose sides, so to speak. It then becomes a contest of the Apostles’ ‘Jesus’ versus Paul’s ‘Jesus’ with Luke’s books running interference somewhere in the middle. Unfortunately, Paul usually wins because he’s the much more Gentile-centric, much more anti-Semitic (less culturally Jewish) option that fits within the neo-Marcionism of today’s pop-Christianity—just as it did in the second century Roman Empire.

In other words, Paul is more like us!

Many God-fearing people end up leaving the Adventist Church because of Paul’s anti-law counsel. They think of Paul as being “infallibly inspired of God” and then correctly deduce and conclude that Adventist leaders are being inconsistent hypocrites with regard to Paul’s “New Covenant” message within the Bible.On the one hand, these leaders claim Paul is a bona fide apostle; but then on the other hand, they abjectly disregard and ignore his deeply antinomianist (anti-Law-of-God) counsels, such as Galatians (the whole book), Romans 14 and Colossians 2—especially with regard to the keeping of the Sabbath.

Ask almost any Christian who is not an Adventist whether or not Christians need to be keeping the Sabbath proper (i.e. on the seventh day of the week), and you’ll be met with someone quoting Romans 14 where Paul says,

“One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.”

Yet, if anyone within Adventist circles dares to say anything about this conflict between Paul and our Adventist tradition, it is generally resolved by reinterpreting Paul’s words to make Paul sound more logical and less confusing. The typical expression is, “What Paul really meant was …”[3]

The American journalist, Upton Sinclair, once wrote,

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends upon his not understanding it.”

Our own Adventist leadership is deeply rooted in such a position—their very jobs and livelihood are secure only when they do not agitate and only when they conform to the mainstream of orthodox Adventist theology—even if that theology is dead wrong! When you have Adventist leadership earning their living only because they maintain an orthodox Adventist (traditional) perspective, you will not have an easy time convincing our best and brightest people to challenge any doctrine that could jeopardize their livelihoods.

Despite such criticism, it remains obvious that the SDA Church has not been without the Holy Spirit of God! Indeed, the highly redeeming aspect of modern Christianity is not what we “believe”, but in fact what we “do” in our walk with Almighty God. Christians, and Adventists especially, remain Torah-observant people at heart. We try to honor God’s instruction, and we also try to reach out and help others as best we can. But we still may find ourselves wondering – do these actions save us? “Are we saved by works or by grace?”

Adventists and indeed all Christians should recognize that this question itself is flawed and designed to promote an errant ‘either/or’ response. The correct answer to such a question is to first correct the question to allow for the full answer to be imparted. When asked, “Are we saved by works or by grace?” The correct answer is both! It is not either/or! The true mechanism of God’s salvation is that ‘Man is saved through ‘repentance’.[4]

Repentance—the simple turning from one’s sin and doing what God requests of His people—embodies both grace and works. This is the very heart and core of God’s grace. The grace and forgiveness of God is never bestowed upon the unrepentant heart that refuses to let go of sin. While we may sin again and again, God indeed looks for a contrite heart that longs to be released from and forgiven of sin. When a contrite spirit and an eagerness to do what is right are present within the man, a beautiful thing happens within the heart and a change begins to occur. The Eternal One tells us, “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength”. This, then, is God’s true Biblical mechanism of salvation, not atonement through the blood of a sacrifice!