BY ROY ADAMS

N HIS INAUGURAL message to the church as president of the General Conference back in March 1999 Elder Jan Paulsen chose to focus on what he regarded as the essence of the gospel: the coming of Jesus as Messiah, His death, His resurrection, His high-priestly ministry, and His glorious second coming. As I listened I felt a deep sense of gratitude that the leader of our church could have such a precise and comprehensive grasp of the core message of the Christian faith, and at the same time couch it within the general context of the three angels’ messages, the bedrock of the Adventist Church.

We published Paulsen’s address in the Review,¹ and one reader responded as follows: “My heart and the heart of Jesus is very sad that you, the president of this church, does not even know what the gospel is. You have accepted the ‘gospel’ taught by the devil and the worldly churches.”

The writer then gives his own definition: The gospel “is the ‘good news.’” And the good news “has always been and will always be that if you keep the Ten Commandments and are obedient to God, you will have eternal life.” Farther down the page comes this startling elaboration: The gospel “is what Jesus taught: Be perfect . . . , stop sinning . . . , and keep the Ten Commandments in order to earn your eternal life. . . . That is the good news.”²

It’s downright frightening to think that there might be Sabbath school teachers and local elders and even some pastors propagating such ideas in our churches today.

What do we need in order to secure ourselves against such fallacies? And how do we keep steady when the message becomes even more subtle, more sophisticated, more psychologically attractive? In the midst of a growing tidal wave of contemporary ideas—from New Age fantasies to the cocky disputations of postmodernism—where can we find secure anchor? Are we to be sitting ducks for every specious doctrine foisted upon us by misguided enthusiasts and charismatic charlatans?

I think Fritz Guy would answer that we each should develop the ability to “think theologically.” In his magnum opus, Thinking Theologically,³ this longtime Adventist scholar-theologian has attempted to fill what I consider an important vacuum in contemporary Adventism.

You can’t go past the first page of the book without discovering the burden that weighs down on its author. There is a “widespread” problem in contemporary Adventism, Guy says—“a theological kind of attention deficit disorder.”⁴ Guy’s hope is that his book will help prevent this malady in those not yet infected.

Thinking Theologically is not a book of theology, Guy says, but rather a book about theology, about how to do theology. And while hoping the work would prove “helpful to theological students and pastors,” Guy’s first concern is for the lay reader. Drawing on his wide experience and expertise honed from decades in the classroom, Guy attempts to introduce nontheologians to the method of disciplined religious reflection, a crying need of our church today. Nothing is of greater consequence than learning how to process the huge volume of ideas and opinions and beliefs that bombard us daily.

Every so often, at camp meetings and other gatherings, one can hear demagogic aspersions of theology: “We don’t need theology,” a speaker might say. “All we need is Jesus!” Uttered with passion and conviction, the comment usually brings choruses of amens, if not also applause.

If theology is seen as an exercise in far-fetched, metaphysical abstractions having no connection to life in the real world, then such put-downs are well deserved. But theology—authentic theology—is not that. As practical as life itself, it’s what keeps us from being tomfooled or manipulated by the misguided and the unscrupulous. It forms the bedrock upon which we anchor everything else. Without that foundation we’re completely adrift.

“All we need is Jesus”? What is Jesus? Who is Jesus? And why do we need Him, and not the Buddha or Plato or Muhammad or whoever? Without theology, that affirmation, as much as we might agree with it on its face, would have absolutely no content or meaning. The name Jesus, as a reference to a person who lived 2,000 years ago in Palestine, can be appreciated correctly only in a theological context. Without that context, it’s void of any significance.

No Loose Ends
Intellectually Thinking Theologically is a work of art. There isn’t a boring page.  Each idea, as it develops, gives evidence of a mind intolerant of loose ends. And one’s pencil comes out often, to highlight yet another brilliant turn of phrase, yet another arresting thought worth returning to. Guy’s definition of sanctification, for example. Sanctification, he says, “is the behavioral expression of our response to the good news of God’s love in Christ; . . . the increasingly extensive and intensive actualization of that love in our lives.”⁵ How do you like that?

Compare this with the sentiments of a gentleman who wrote to Kit Watts when she was still on our staff. His burden was the 144,000. The Review should say more about the subject, he pleaded. Not for his benefit, however—he already had a pretty good handle on the group. “No sick or sickly” among them, he wrote—as if giving us the lead paragraph for our first article, “no inhibitingly handicapped, no obese, no infants, babies, or youngsters; no pregnant women, no old people, no flakes or screwballs, no weak-minded, no queezy stomached—100 percent vegetarian, robust health, long-suffering, meek, lowly, humble, patient, endure extremes, intelligent, resourceful, loving, alert, faithful, courteous, spirit-filled, guileless, perfect.”

Though it may not immediately occur to you, this is also an attempt to define sanctification. And the hopelessness (and silliness) of it all is shown in the following offhanded admission: “Obviously, as of this writing,” he says, “there are not 144,000 people in the world [and he means the number literally] qualified to pass through the time of Jacob’s trouble without an intercessor.”

We Can Do Better
If you find some of these examples extreme, I’d join you in doing battle with anyone who tries to paint the whole Adventist Church with that kind of brush. But I wouldn’t have used them if I didn’t think there was sufficient resonance for such offbeat ideas in certain sectors of the church. A pastor wrote me recently about a problem he’s facing in his territory. Legalists in his congregation, he said, are demanding he publicly address their concern: “What does God do with our sin once it is forgiven?” It reminded me of Martin Luther’s response somewhere when asked what God was doing before He created the universe. “He was making sticks,” Luther said, “to beat people who ask such silly questions.”

Guy’s book stands as a testimony that Adventist thought can rise above such quirky concerns to grapple with matters of substance. A church worth its salt in these times is one that moves away from such mindless trivialities and “foolish controversies” (Titus 3:9, NIV) and tries to understand the broad social and political context in which it must undertake its mission. It seeks to understand the contemporary culture as intimately as it can, and then to enter into a constructive and prophetic engagement with it.  

It’s for this reason that Guy gives attention to the state of society. “Our culture,” he argues, “is predominantly and pervasively secular: the primary locus of meaning is here and now, and the ‘good’ is defined by consumer values, namely, those which contribute to the immediate comfort, entertainment, or satisfaction of ourselves or our groups.”⁶ The church must face the culture, however “difficult and uncomfortable” that may be. To fail here, Guy says, whether out of “fear of change or out of loyalty to . . . [our] past,” is to betray our “commitment to ‘present truth.’”⁷ The chapter is worth the price of the book. As I read it, I found myself saying out loud: “This is good stuff!” 

This does not mean, of course, that I agree with everything in the book.

In chapter 11, to cite one area of concern, Guy argues that “our cultural identity profoundly influences the way we experience and understand all of existence, including our religious faith.” Point well taken. But then he goes on: “To put it bluntly,” he says, “because the world comprises a diversity of cultural contexts, the idea of one completely homogeneous, internationally identical Adventist theology is not plausible.”⁸

What exactly does this mean? I’ve heard similar sentiments over the past 20 years, but no one ever goes into detail. Or when they do, they come up with theological inconsequentials such as the time for Sabbath school; the earliest age for baptism; whether the entire church should use the same quarterly; whether a beverage other than grape juice might be used for the Lord’s Supper; and so forth.

But does the idea mean to include such heavyweights as the nature of human beings and what happens when they die? Might animistic beliefs be tolerable in some cultures? If there’s a contemporary culture that (like the ancient Gnostics) finds the idea of God coming in human flesh repugnant, would that fall within the ambit of what Guy has in mind? How about the Second Coming? the ministry of Christ in the heavenly sanctuary? the Sabbath? In short, what areas of theology would Guy include here?

Others may find their own areas of concern. But that precisely is what the book is for: to nudge us to think—to think theologically. I weep inside to see the one-sided—even dangerous—theology our people drink down with nary a question asked. Whole congregations have broken away on account of a failure to apply theological rigor to new ideas.

And just here the book makes one of its most important contributions to contemporary Adventist thought. The current polarization in the church, Guy argues, grows out of just three competing theological emphases: an emphasis on “the gospel” to the exclusion of everything else; a concern for relevance—that the church become more contemporary, more modern, more with-it; and a preoccupation with “historic Adventism.”

The solution, he says, lies in holding each of these three emphases—“poles,” he calls them—in tension. Pole number one, “the Christian gospel, . . . is our spiritual center.” Pole number two, “our cultural context, . . . is where we live, worship, witness, and serve.” Pole number three, “our Adventist heritage, . . . is the foundation of our theological identity.”⁹ It’s vital that all three poles function together, Guy says. He then makes the following critical observation, which every Adventist, whatever their leaning, needs to hear: “Adventist theology is called to be always evangelical, but not pretentiously so; always contextual, but not mindlessly so; always distinctive, but not fanatically so.”¹⁰ To focus exclusively on any one of these poles is to disfigure the shape of our message radically and fail “to live up to the Adventist theological vocation.”¹¹

That one concept, taken seriously, can forever end the enervating polarization within the church.

If space permitted, we could go on to speak about Guy’s treatment of the theological and social significance of the Sabbath. It’s a classic. So also is his handling of the issue of the role of Ellen G. White’s writings in the Adventist Church, over against the Reformation principle of sola scriptura. The same holds good for his balanced comments on the doctrine of the sanctuary. That doctrine, he says, “combines the continuing ministry of Jesus the Messiah as high priest on behalf of humanity and its conclusion in a process of judgment before the end of history.”¹² His approach is tight, sensible, credible. And it shows how the traditional Adventist position might make sense to critics and inquirers, both inside and outside the church. 

Will It Help?
In the contemporary sea of theological junk, it does the mind good to come across a theologian who makes sense.

Will the book make a difference? Only time will tell. But one thing is sure: We need its emphasis desperately. We have among us a lot of what I call contentious theology. Angry theology. Theology that’s always fighting someone, always berating the church for past and present mistakes, always decrying its failures, its shallowness, its theological denseness. It’s a whining, polemical, trash-and-burn theology that leaves me cold.

Then there is what I call hobbyhorse theology. Theology preoccupied with a single issue—perhaps two—that it rides continually: the Sabbath, the nature of Christ, righteousness by faith, health reform, whatever. It becomes nauseating after a while, and you want to say: Come off it! Get a life! Give us a break!

Theology should not affect people that way. Done right, it should attract, not repel.

Those close to me know that I have a serious beef about what I see as a lack of theological rigor among Adventists today—in our writing, our preaching, our conversation. We’re into theological pabulum and bedtime stories. “That’s what’s selling now,” they say. And every crackpot with a computer suddenly has the capability of flooding the market with reams of theological trash.

Thinking Theologically seeks to buck that trend. It’s perhaps a first book of its kind in the Adventist Church. Rather than curse the darkness, as perhaps I myself have done here, Guy has lit a candle. The book is meant to be “lay-friendly,” and I think it is. But you’ll need to be fully rested. And you’ll need to pay attention.

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 ¹ See “The Urgency of the Gospel,” Apr. 8, 1999.
 ² Italics supplied.
 ³ Thinking Theologically: Adventist Christianity and the Interpretation of Faith (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 1999).
 ⁴ Ibid., pp. vii, 206.
 ⁵ Ibid., p. 135. (Italics supplied.)
 ⁶ Ibid., pp. 160, 161.
 ⁷ Ibid., pp. 159, 160.
 ⁸ Ibid., p. 233.
 ⁹ Ibid., p. 225.
¹⁰ Ibid., p. 226. (Italics supplied.)
¹¹ Ibid., pp. 251, 252.
¹² Ibid., p. 206.

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Roy Adams is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.