Out of Adventism

A Theologian's Journey

Jerry A. Gladson

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781532631269
• eBook ISBN: 9781532631252
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

From its humble beginnings in the nineteenth century, Seventh-day Adventism has remarkably grown to become one of America's largest, home-grown faiths, numbering nearly nineteen million members worldwide. Yet Adventism harbors dark secrets within its history. This is the true story of how one Adventist pastor, and university and seminary professor discovered these dark secrets and learned through painful, personal experience that neither the denomination nor its doctrine could be trusted. As his odyssey takes him from pastoral assignments in rural and urban congregations and finally into teaching religion at an Adventist university, he suddenly finds himself caught up in the maelstrom of a church's greatest theological crisis. For him, the denomination's theology and practice agonizingly unravel, forcing him to choose between loyalty to his church, his vocation, and his personal integrity. Rich in anecdotes and personal experiences, Out of Adventism guides readers interested in religious history, cults, and sects through the ins and outs of a religious community in crisis. Along the way, the reader not only gets an insider's view of Adventism, but also discovers a careful critique of the peculiar teachings of Seventh-day Adventism.

Part One

Beginnings

1

The Lure of Adventism

Nothing happens unless first a dream.

—Carl Sandberg

The baby blue designer phone beside the bed jangled irritatingly, stirring Laura, my wife, and me out of peaceful, early morning dreams. Blinking bleary, unfocused eyes, I glanced out the window. Already the milky dawn seeped in under the darkness, casting the room in an eerie, surreal morning light. I glanced at the digital clock: 6:00 am. Who could be calling this early? An emergency? A church member in crisis?

Laura, as usual, had already snatched the phone before I had half-awakened. Holding her hand over the receiver, she whispered, “It’s Douglas Bennett!”

“Sorry to call so early, but I felt I’d be more likely to reach you at this early hour.” The familiar voice I hadn’t heard in more than seven years jolted me into full consciousness. Douglas Bennett was the newly appointed chair of the religion department at Southern Adventist University.1 He had been my favorite professor, as well as mentor and spiritual advisor, when Laura and I were in college nearly a decade before. At that time he’d newly arrived at the University fresh from a highly successful pastorate, brimming with thrilling ideas that fledgling theological students would be anxious to try in their pastoral field assignments. As an upper level undergraduate student, I had served as the religion department’s supervisor of Southern’s student minister field placement under Bennett’s direction. On Saturdays (Seventh-day Adventists observe Saturday as the Sabbath) the University sent out its upper-level theological students to fill the pulpits of some local Adventist churches. This program functioned as a kind of internship and was an excellent, hands-on introduction to pastoral work.

“Jerry, we want you and Laura to come for a visit and look over the campus to see if we can entice you to join the religion faculty.” Was Bennett for real? This couldn’t be happening! I was the senior minister of the third largest congregation in the Seventh-day Adventist Kentucky-Tennessee Conference. The Adventist denomination at its basic level is organized into Conferences, usually made up of a state or sometimes two. At the top hierarchical level, a General Conference heads the worldwide church, followed by Divisions, which embrace entire continents, such as North America; then Unions, which are specific geographical regions. Like all local church pastors, I held ordained ministerial credentials in a local Conference. That meant I was licensed to administer the sacraments, provide pastoral care, preach and teach, and conduct the administrative affairs of Adventist churches anywhere in the world.

My particular congregation was located in Madison, Tennessee, just off Donelson Parkway, twenty miles northeast of Nashville and some ten miles west of the Hermitage, the historic home of President Andrew Jackson. The five-hundred member congregation worshipped in an attractive building, constructed in popular 1960s architectural style. A healthy group of vibrant young families usually filled the light brownstone edifice on Saturday mornings. I was concluding my third year at the church, and thoroughly enjoying pastoral ministry. Never had I given a moment’s thought to leaving the parish for academia. Bennett’s early morning telephone call sparked memory of a comment by Bruce Johnston, then the chair of the religion department. I was then preparing to graduate. “Jerry, you should go out into the parish, get some good pastoral experience,” Johnston said, “then come back and teach, maybe here or at some other college.” Not on your life, I thought. I wanted to be a pastor—in the pulpit—not spend my life in an “ivory tower” in academia. That was final! I was certain of it.

Bennett’s invitation, however, whetted more than my curiosity. Perhaps he touched some deep yearning within, a longing for deeper academic study, a buried but almost forgotten desire actually to become a theological scholar. If I were to join the University faculty, I would literally be following in Bennett’s footsteps. That was a heady thought! Bennett had served my present congregation, the Boulevard Seventh-day Adventist Church, just before joining the faculty at the University. He had led the congregation in constructing its present modern facility.

I had no idea then how his early morning telephone call—the events it set in motion—would alter my life and almost completely destroy my ministry. Ironically, it would also free me from a spiritual bondage as yet unrecognized but already stealthily coiling its tentacles around my soul.

Collegedale, home of Southern Adventist University, lies nestled in a bucolic valley, sheltered by green, low-lying hills, not far from Chattanooga, Tennessee. The University, founded in 1892 by an Adventist teacher, George Colcord, had been originally a one-room school. Colcord already had another college founding to his credit in Walla Walla, Washington. Just before World War I, Southern had migrated from Graysville, Tennessee, in a caravan of slow-moving, horse-drawn wagons and a herd of cattle a distance of forty miles to the newly purchased Thatcher farm. Once in the new location it was christened Southern Junior College, and the village that grew up around it, Collegedale.

The college would undergo several more name changes, each reflecting further maturation of its fledgling, sponsoring denomination. Earlier, in 1897, while still at Graysville, it had been called the Southern Industrial School; in 1901, Southern Training School; in 1955, when it became a senior college, Southern Missionary College, a name it bore at the time I joined the faculty. Later, it was renamed Southern College of Seventh-day Adventists, and then, in 1997, having finally achieved university status, Southern Adventist University. From a one-room school with twenty-three students it had grown by the 1970s into a thriving liberal arts college of two thousand, one of nine Seventh-day Adventist colleges in the United States and Canada.

Now, in the spring of 1972, having discovered I was already at work on my MA in Old Testament at Vanderbilt University, Bennett had invited me to return to my alma mater to teach. Rarely do universities appoint faculty who do not hold at least one graduate degree; I was therefore more than a little surprised. I would have to start out at the lowest faculty rank (Instructor) and work my way up the academic ladder.

“The University wants you to finish your MA, of course,” he explained, outlining further the provisions of the offer, “and then seek the PhD, either at Vanderbilt or another university.” The implicit caveat was that no Adventist university at the time offered a doctorate specifically in the field of Old Testament. For several years I had quietly nurtured a desire to earn a PhD in the field of religious studies while continuing to work as an active pastor. I had already settled upon the field of study: Old Testament or, as it is now usually called, Hebrew Bible/Scripture. With the University’s offer to sponsor me for the PhD, the concern over how I could pay for such an expensive education was resolved.

September rolled around. I faced three rather large classes of excited, yet terrified freshman students signed up to take my hastily constructed course in the history and development of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. I was as frightened as they! By lecturing on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and then driving a hundred fifty miles to Vanderbilt University in Nashville on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I managed to complete my MA that year and then embark on what turned out to be a rigorous six-year path that led to the PhD in Old Testament. As I stood in front of my first class, I couldn’t help but be humbled by the journey that had led to my being there.

I had first heard about Southern Adventist University shortly after a short, balding man, dressed in tie, white shirt, and dark blue suit, representing the local Seventh-day Adventist church, called at our home one lazy summer Saturday afternoon. I was twelve years old at the time. His purpose in calling at our doorstep was to offer our family a series of in-home audiovisual Bible presentations. We lived on McFalls Street in Dalton, Georgia, a growing textile manufacturing town, destined eventually to become the carpet and flooring trade center of the nation. It lay about thirty miles south of Chattanooga in a valley at the mountainous tip where the Appalachians exhaust themselves into northern Georgia.

My brother, Raymond, fifteen years older than I, had married five years earlier and moved with his wife, Billie, to Danville, Virginia. Our family—my parents, Howard and Laura, my sister, Deena, brother, Michael, and I—lived in a small white, three-bedroom stuccoed house that my father had personally built. The house perched on a modest swell of red clay soil beside a graveled road. The road trekked from the main highway that ran from Dalton to Cleveland, Tennessee, down to a tiny, sluggish stream almost hidden in a maze of swamp willows, and then up past our house. Dusty roads snaking through the neighborhood provided choice bicycle paths over which my friends and I roamed during the lazy summer days. We had no television—TV stations were remote and reception was poor, anyway—so when the Whitfield County library bookmobile rolled through on its regular route, I checked out ten or twelve sports novels or biographies to read until it returned the next month. This fed my growing, unquenchable passion for reading that has turned me into a lifelong book lover.

Although my father’s sister, Maude, had become a Seventh-day Adventist in the 1940s while living in Columbia, South Carolina, I knew very little about the faith, and as a soon-to-be teenager, cared even less. Aunt Maude struck me as emotionally distant, strict, and religiously fanatical, although I scarcely knew what such words meant. This early impression was wholly unfair, because she was always kind and treated me with great respect. She did, however, interminably argue with my dad, trying as an older sister to convince him that Adventists were right about Christianity. Her attire reflected that of many devout Adventists—plain, neat, and homely, devoid of makeup or jewelry. Traditionally, Adventists believe in simple, unadorned dress, and do not approve of the wearing of jewelry, even engagement or wedding bands. Such accouterments are considered ostentatious. I just couldn’t comprehend her strange religion. Every Saturday, when she came for a visit, she faithfully attended the local Adventist Church, a red brick building with amber-tinted windows, located on the opposite side of town from where we lived, across the street from the Dalton High School football stadium. Sometimes my mother went with her. But I never did. I wanted nothing to do with such an odd religion.

Each Saturday evening around 6:30, the same man who had come to our door in the dark suit returned. He now brought with him an older, white-haired man I later learned was his father-in-law, who also happened to be the pastor of the Dalton Seventh-day Adventist Church. The duo set up a black metallic filmstrip projector mounted on a large, cumbersome reel-to-reel tape recorder. The tiny screen they placed at the far side of our small living room soon sprang to life with vivid, colorful images of the strange animal-like creatures artistically inspired by the books of Daniel and Revelation, embellished by scriptural quotations, and backgrounded by hauntingly beautiful music. Since our family had no television, I was captivated by this, and really looked forward to these dramatic presentations, although I didn’t really understand them. We were being subtly introduced to Seventh-day Adventism. Adventists, like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, commonly use home-based Bible studies as a method of winning converts to the faith. Jehovah’s Witnesses may have actually borrowed this method from Adventists. When I later became an Adventist minister, I would also conduct similar Bible studies, both with the aid of a filmstrip slide projector, and often simply with a Bible and a family gathered around the kitchen table.

These home-based Bible studies were intentionally planned to climax at about the same time as an Adventist evangelist arrived in Dalton to begin a series of public evangelistic lectures in an old, abandoned theater that had been scrubbed and cleaned by volunteers from the local Adventist church. Arnold Kurtz, the ev...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Permissions
• Foreword
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Part One: Beginnings
• Part Two: Crisis
• Part Three: Aftermath
• Epilogue: Whither Seventh-day Adventism?
• Bibliography