CULTS CR IT IQUES / by Betty Bruechert
SDA’s: A Change off Tune?
N o t o f t e n i n t h e thankless, and often grim, busi ness . of attempting to expose false teachings in the light of the Word of God does one encounter any thing humorous. But an article in the Sept. 6, 1962 issue of the Seventh-Day Adventist official publication Review and Herald would be funny if it were not so tragic. Written by no less an authority than Robert L. Odom, Index Editor of Ellen G. White Publications, it bears the incredible title of “The Heresy of Time- Setting.” One who saw this piece exclaimed: “Why, the Adventists were the date-setters of all time!” And so they were. This article is notable, not for what it contains, but for what it omits. While Mr. Odom repeats a num ber of Mrs. White’s belated warnings against date setting, he fails to include the pertinent facts that originally both she and her husband fully accepted and proclaimed William Miller’s predictions of the exact dates for Christ’s return. Miller had written in his pamphlet: “I believe the time can be known by all who desire to understand . . . Between March 21, 1840 and March 21, 1844 . . . Christ will come.” I should have thought the less said about this, the better. But let a former Seventh-Day Adventist, a promi nent minister of that sect for twenty-eight years, tell how completely the Whites were converted to Miller’s beliefs. I refer to the late Rev. D. M. Canright, who came to see the unscriptural views of this sect, separat ed from it, and denounced their teachings. As was to be expected, he was maligned and persecuted by the Seventh-Day Adventists until his death, but he stood true to his convictions and was responsible for the deliverance of hundreds of people from this system. The greater number of his books on the life of Mrs. White and those exposing the heresies of the Seventh- Day Adventist teachings were written while Mrs. White was still living. He was well acquainted with both Mrs. White and her husband, also the whole early history of the sect “from the inside.” Here is a part of what he says on this subject from his book Seventh-Day Adventism Renounced, pp. 75-77 (1889): “It is the one constant boast of the Seventh-Day Adventists that they never set time; they don’t believe in it. But they deceive themselves and deceive others when they say so. Elder (James) White, their leader, engaged in preaching three different set times for the Lord’s return, viz., 1843, 1844, 1845. Here are his own statements on this: ‘I found myself happy in the faith that Christ would come about the year 1843’ ( L ife In cidents, p. 72). Then he tells how he preached it. Of 1844, he says: ‘I stated my conviction that Christ would come on the tenth day of the seventh Jewish month of that year (1844)’ (pp. 166, 167). ‘It is well-known that many were expecting the Lord to come at the seventh month, 1845. That Christ would then come we firmly believed. A few days before the time passed, I was at Fairhaven and Dartmouth, Mass, with a mes sage on this point of time’ (A Word to the L ittle Flock, by James White, p. 22). So their leader was a time- setter. “Mrs. White, their prophetess, was in the time setting of 1843 and 1844. She herself says, ‘We were firm in the belief that the preaching of definite time 22
was of God’ ( Testimonies [of Mrs. White,] Vol. I, p. 56). Of the first date she says, ‘With carefulness and trembling we approached the time when our Saviour was expected to appear.’ Then she tells her disappoint ment ( Testimonies, Vol. I, p. 48). Again: ‘Our hopes now centered on the coming of the Lord in 1844’ (p. 53). She was a time-setter. “Elders Bates, Andrews, Rhodes, and all the first crop' of Seventh-Day Adventists were in the time-set ting of 1843, 1844. They still [1889] endorse Miller’s time-setting of 1843 and 1844 as right and approved of God. How much truth, then, is there in their asser tions that they have never set time? . . . Are they the same people or are they not? . . . But don’t Seventh- Day Adventists rise to explain why they were disap pointed in 1843, and again in 1844, and for forty years since? [Remember this book was written in 1889.] Oh, yes; but we naturally become a little suspicious of the man who is compelled to be constantly explaining his conduct. Straight work needs no explanation. They say the Lord caused them to be disappointed in 1843, on purpose to test their faith, that was all! In 1844 they made just one little mistake, that was all! They then taught that the earth was the sanctuary. Come to find out, [they said], the sanctuary is up in heaven, and Jesus did really come, in a certain sense, that very year! So they were right, after all. Don’t you see? Clear as day. Now they have the whole matter removed from the troublesome facts of earth, where we can test them, to the beautiful theories of heaven, where no one can go to report on facts which might spoil their theories. Now they can speculate and argue in safety. But sober, thinking men see through all this. It is merely a make shift to get them out of a diffi culty.” (End of quotation from Canright.) If one asks, “What difference does it make if Mrs. White were mistaken in her dates for the return of the Lord?” I reply that since Mrs. White — her visions, her revelations, her writings — are Seventh-Day Ad ventism, it makes all the difference in the world as to the reliability of the teachings of this sect. If she who is, and always has been, regarded as the “inspired prophetess” of the Seventh-day Adventists, could be so completely in error on such a vital matter as the re turn of Christ, when He had said plainly, “Ye know NOT WHEN the time is” (Mark 13:33), is it not rea sonable to conclude that she might be mistaken about the rest of her peculiar views, such as that of the sanctuary (above referred to), sabbath-keeping, Satan as co-sin-bearer, annihilation instead of the endless hell described by our Saviour, soul-sleeping in place of the Apostle Paul’s “absent from the body-present with the Lord” doctrine and other views? Old William Miller who started the Adventists down this crooked road, lived to admit: “We expected the personal coming of Christ at that time; and now to contend that we were not mistaken is dishonest. I have no confidence in any of the new theories that grew out of the movement” (H istory of the Advent Message, pp. 410, 412). Neither do we. We believe that the major portion of Mrs. White’s teachings are unscriptural and that she was an erring, Satanically-misled woman and that in building their denomination upon her, Seventh-Day Adventism was erected upon “sinking sand.” THE KING'S BUSINESS
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