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1888 Heart and Soul: Theology of The Faith Jesu eventh-day Adventist doctrine and theology today is directly BY MERLIN BURT influenced by the teaching and experience that grew out of 1888 and the 1890s. Those years have yielded three significant and foundational developments: A new clarity on the role of the Ten Commandments in relation to salvation, reframing the third angel’s message of Revelation 14 in terms of righteousness by faith in Jesus, and a shift toward a biblical Trinitarian understanding. The Role of the Law in Salvation “Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster” (Gal. 3:24, 25, KJV). This text launched the new emphasis on righteousness by faith for the Seventhday Adventist Church leading up to the 1888 Minneapolis, Minnesota, General Conference session. It had been controversial through much of the history of the church. The fundamental question was whether the law referred to was the Ten Commandments or was it the system of sacrifices and ceremonies connected to the earthly sanctuary service? An important point for this discus- 24 (904) | www.AdventistReview.org | October 10, 2013
s sion is that righteousness by faith was not a new idea in 1888. During the early 1850s Adventist leaders such as James White and J. N. Andrews had taught that the moral law pointed us to Jesus. In an 1851 tract Andrews wrote: “How is the law a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ? Answer. The law shows our guilt and just condemnation, and that we are lost without a Savior.” 1 A year later James White wrote: “Those who represent Sabbathkeepers as going away from Jesus, the only source of justification, and rejecting His atoning blood, and seeking justification by the law, do it either ignorantly or wickedly.” 2 But J. H. Waggoner’s 1854 tract shows that the matter continued to require address. He admonished readers that “if it were even possible for them to keep [the law], it would lead them to trust in themselves, and seek for justification by personal obedience, instead of seeking to the Savior for it.” 3 Waggoner unfortunately took an additional step and excluded the ceremonial law from Galatians. “Respecting [the] letter to the Galatians,” he wrote, “not a single declaration has been found therein which can be referred to the ceremonial or Levitical law.” 4 This was awkward for Seventh-day Adventist ministers who, in debate with other Protestant ministers, had argued that the ceremonial, and not the moral law, was a shadow that pointed us to Christ. Waggoner’s book was withdrawn, and the position in print over the next 30 years presented the ceremonial law as the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. The conflict grew during the mid-1880s when Waggoner’s son E. J. Waggoner presented in the Signs of the Times that the law in Galatians 3:24, 25 was the moral law. Church leaders G. I. Butler and Uriah Smith saw this as an attempt to revive an old argument that had been debunked. Tragically, many in the church were legalistic in their approach to the Ten Commandments. Ellen White would write in 1890: “As a people, we have preached the law until we are as dry as the hills of Gilboa that had neither dew nor rain.” 5 Waggoner, like his father, presented the gospel in relation to the Ten Commandments. The law condemns us, and drives us to Jesus as the only Savior who can forgive our sins. The surface issue in 1888 was the law in Galatians. But the real problem was indifference to righteousness by faith. Butler and Waggoner both published www.AdventistReview.org | October 10, 2013 | (905) 25
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