October 26, 224
Loma Linda University
My knowledge of what happened at the conference on "Adventist Identity" that David Trim and his colleagues convened at Andrews University two years ago and we are discussing this afternoon is based on videos I watched and lectures I read.
Although a number of things that were said and done did not appeal to me, I believe that the conference as a whole made a distinctive contribution to our understanding of Adventist Identity.
This contribution was its emphasis upon shared narrative, along with shared doctrine and shared practice, as one of its three primary features. This addition of shared narrative makes it possible for us think of Adventist identity as an equilateral triangle. One of its sides is shared doctrine. A second side is shared practice. The third side is shared narrative.
I take it that by “Narrative” we mean at least two things. One of them is the story of our own denomination that we call “The Great Advent Movement.” The other is the story of the whole universe that we call “The Great Controversy." Strictly speaking, the first is a narrative and the second is a metanarrative.
Before a person can become a citizen of the United States, he or she must pass a basic test about the nation’s history. Although we should not make doing well on a test about our denomination’s history an entrance requirement, especially now that in some parts of the world we are baptizing tens of thousands at a time, we should make it a part of every member’s continuing education.
Taking billions of dollars in assets with them, since 2022 about eight thousand of the forty thousand congregations in the United Methodist Church have left to form the new Global Methodist Church. Many people say that disagreements about homosexuality caused this divorce. This is the truth but not the whole truth. The greater part of the truth is that the United Methodists did not have enough of a shared history to hold them together as they worked their way through this complicated challenge.
The denomination was established as recently as 1968 as a merger of two denominations each of which was a merger of previous ones. When things became difficult, some United Methodists psychologically retreated to their earlier traditions, formed new alliances and eventually left. This was not a divorce. It was an annulment.
Our “Great Controversy” metanarrative, like all metanarratives, is expressed in language that is neither literal nor fictional but figurative. As in the expression “Big Bang,” figurative language points toward actual things but it does so in ways that are partial and imprecise. Literalizing and fictionalizing metanarratives are equally serious mistakes.
Questions about who will choose our metanarratives are not the best because we cannot compel others to endorse the metanarratives that we think they should. The Stalinists tried to do this. Even though they slaughtered six million people and caused another three million to die because of their bad policies, they were unable wholly to impose their metanarrative on the population.
Metanarratives and scientific paradigms function the same way. We always begin with the ones we inherit. We revise them over the course of our lives as evidence and experience require. When we have revised them so often or so thoroughly that they fall apart, we choose or create new ones.
The Andrews University conference on Adventist Identity did not give our Doctrine of the Whole Person anywhere near the attention it deserves. This puzzles me because I beleve that it is the "most present" of all our Present Truths.
This doctrine is the idea that body and soul, or mind and matter, are not aggregated. They are integrated. They are not different coins. They are opposite sides of the same coin. As such, they live and die together. The body is not Plato’s prison of the soul. It is Paul’s temple of the Holy Spirit.
Not many people now wonder how long it will be before the Second Coming of Jesus occurs, what day of the week is the true Sabbath and what Jesus was doing in the heavenly sanctuary on October 22, 1844. Many do wonder how best to understand and live their lives.
Our Doctrine of the Whole Person enjoys much support among Biblical scholars. At one time, we were very much alone on this. This is no longer so.
I believe that it is congenial with three schools of contemporary philosophical thought. I have in mind Philip Clayton and emergence theory, Nancey Murphy and nonreductive physicalism and David Ray Griffin on organic realism. Books like Damasio’s’ Descartes Error show that it is compatible with important schools of scientific thought as well.
The Doctrine of the Whole Person does away with both the second and the first most evil ideas of all time. The second most evil idea is the concept of hell as never-ending pain of some sort. The first most evil idea is the combination of this concept of hell with either of the two most influential theories of divine predestination. One says that God freely chooses to rescue some of us from the unending pain of hell that all of us deserve. The other says that before we are conceived God decides which of us will go to heaven and which of us will go to hell. Either way, there is nothing any of us can do to change our ultimate destiny.
I believe that the Doctrine of the Whole Person is a viable alternative to a kind of dualism that has longed permeated our culture with what I think are adverse consequences. People call it “substance dualism” because it says that there are two irreducible different substances. On the one hand, we have “extended substance” which we also call “matter” or “body.” On the other hand, we have “mental substance,” which we also call “mind” or “soul.” This way of thinking has caused two problems, one theoretical and the other practical.
The theoretical problem is that, both philosophically and scientifically, it is difficult to explain how mind and matter interact when they are irreducibly different. The Doctrine of the Whole Person starts with the presupposition that they are not irreducibly different. It dares to speaks of an indivisible “psychosomatic” or “soul/body” unity. This does not mean that quarks can think. It does mean that there is something about quarks that allows them to be configured in increasingly complex ways that sometimes eventuate in organisms like us that can think.
The practical problem is that substance dualism often divides things that we should hold together. STEM courses and courses in the humanities is one example. Sexuality and spirituality is another. Mental labor and manual labor is still another. Economics and ecology is another. Human and subhuman is one of the very worse of our dualistic divisions. The cruelty with which this division allows us to treat animals in factory farms and slaughter houses is nothing short of nauseating.
Our Doctrine of the Whole Person is the primary reason why we SDAs have invested so much energy and money in institutions of all kinds all over the world. According to David Trim’s reports, these include 19 media centers, 23 food industries, 56 publishing houses, 39 worker training institutes, 6,897 primary schools, 2,793 secondary schools, 116 colleges or universities, 233 hospitals and sanitariums, 126 nursing and retirement homes, 1,413 medical clinics and dispensaries, 126 dental clinics, 16 orphanages and children’s homes and one Adventist Development and Relief Agency that in 2023 served 20,385,297 beneficiaries.
These considerations are enough to convince me that our Doctrine of the Whole Person is by far the most present of all our Present Truths. I hope that I’ve said enough to persuade at least one other person in this audience to agree!